bug handling policy / interaction with users

[Scott Wheeler]

On Saturday 15 March 2003 22:03, Tim Jansen wrote:
> It is not realistic to expect that this will change as long as components 
> are done by unpaid volunteers.

Yes, it is.  Take any (non tech) high profile volunteer organization.  I think 
you would find that they do have some (again, unwritten) standards for how 
members would interact with interested parties outside of the organization.

> In essence the submitter of the bug said 
> "scrap arts, use mplayer". You may be able to change the way the question 
> has been answered, but certainly not the answer itself.

Here my point had nothing to do with the technical content -- just rather the 
character of the responses that should be given to the outside world.  So, in 
this case, "KDE is bound to aRts in the short term future and as such your 
request isn't technically doable in the near furure."  That would have been 
fine.  They might not like it, but it beats, "do it yourself" or "-1 troll".

As Guillaume, this must change for KDE to be have any sort of success on the 
desktop.  It might be argued that we need another mechanism for processing 
these things (i.e. the distributions), but so long as we give users a link 
and place to post wishlist items and bugs, we need to at least be somewhat 
respectful of those that do so.

Cheers,

-Scott

-- 
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb 
as the next guy. 
--Richard Feynman