[Feedback] What did you do with Amarok?

[Jeff Mitchell]

Eric Altendorf wrote:
> Oh, I am completely sure that 90% of the reports you get are total crap.
> 
> However, if there is no channel for people to submit real bug reports,
> or if they are all assumed to be crap like the rest, then what is the
> point in a bug report system at all?  Why waste your time pretending
> to read the reports?

Define "real" bug reports. Everyone thinks that theirs is real,
including you.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198857 has been open less than a
month. I don't really see why this is at all an unreasonable amount of
time to wait for a fix -- actually, considering that it's volunteer
software development, no amount of time is unreasonable...but I digress.

Your bug report is likely a duplicate of one of at least three reports
out there for the same problem. Assuming it's the same problem, which it
very likely is, your bug report was opened after the problem was already
fixed (which means your own bug report isn't "real", but I digress again).

But this illustrates a very important point, which is that bug reports
lie, and relying on them to be accurate and up-to-date with regards to
the status of the described problems is not really valid. (In some
cases, even assuming that it's actually a bug, instead of something like
PEBKAC on the part of the reporter, is not a good assumption either.) It
makes an assumption that the right person saw each of these (duplicate)
bug reports. Speaking as the right person for this particular problem, I
can tell you that I never saw it before today, while you've been sitting
there stewing for a month thinking "man, when are they going to fix this
bug?" while the fix has been sitting in our code repository. This may
lead you to think "well why didn't he see this report before?" -- and
the answer goes back to the 90%-are-total-crap/duplicates metric,
cluttering up bugzilla. If I tried to see every one of those, I'd never
have a chance to code.

I don't actually have a solution to this -- feel free to suggest one (in
a separate thread or private email). But I wanted to give you that
"glimpse" into how things work (and how things don't work, as the case
may be).

--Jeff

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