On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 13:40 -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:
Charles Curley wrote:
You aren't expecting every maintainer to subscribe to user lists and follow all the threads here. Do you? Very very few people have the time to do this and mailing lists are not a good place to keep track of bugs which is why bugzilla exists.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do expect them to subscribe to this list. Not because they are maintainers per se, but because presumably they are users as well. It would be a bit difficult to maintain a package without using Fedora. Of course I could be wrong, which would explain the state of the Mantis package.
But not all users will gain from reading the messages on this list. Certainly most folks capable of maintaining packages would get bored reading the many questions by folks that are new users, especially if they don't have time to help out with answering those questions.
You may well know what the package to maintainer ratio is in Fedora. If not, it's rather large, with nearly 4700 source packages in the distro and a little other 400 maintainers. I don't think it's all that unreasonable to ask that users help out by reporting bugs to bugzilla.
I do understand your hesitation of the package seems so full of bugs that it's pointless. However, if that doesn't get bugzilla'd, then other maintainers may not find out for a while that something is horribly awry in the mantis package and that someone needs some help (or a smack with the cluestick). So, a bugzilla may be the most helpful thing you could do for a terribly broken package, even if it just says that there are numerous problems (listing them briefly) with the package and the whole things needs work.
I agree that bugzilla should work but it has never worked for me. I file bugzillas and nothing much happens. By the time we get through all the requests for further info a new distribution is out and it makes no difference.
I will admit some bugzilla reports are resolved but I have never been that lucky.
I will go further and explain in what situation it is useless to bugzilla. When you problem is more or less unique to your system. If a large fraction on users are having the same problem that your chances of getting an answer are better. -- ======================================================================= The world needs more people like us and fewer like them. ======================================================================= Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam@sbcglobal.net