bugzilla situation

[Andras Mantia]

On Thursday, February 23, 2012 04:57:16 PM David Edmundson wrote:
> > First of all, the bugzilla is supposed to be a communication tool between
> > the user and the developer.
> Or is it?
> 
> If I understand Martin correctly, he wants bugzilla to be "a list of
> things broken in my app", not a communication tool for every user who
> wants to say something.

Bugzilla is not a to-do list, it is for what else... a bug (and wishlist) 
reporting tool for users. 
If you wish to organize your tasks, I'm afraid you should do in another tool.
 
(The rest is not for you, just well, more or less generic comments.)

If you don't like users reporting bugs, close the product for bugzilla, ignore 
the users, and do what you want. Nobody stops you to do that. The projects 
reputation will be hurt, but that is how it works.
 If you have an open bug reporting tool, you should be prepared that users 
will use it. And users are not developers, there are (luckily) millions of KDE 
users out there with various technical knowledge. If you can't accept it, you 
should probably not do front-end application development where you interact 
with people. Or you should do what is written above, or just ignore every 
report.
 I already wrote in a similar thread in the past: open source and especially 
KDE development (where you write applications used directly by a lot of 
people) requires some communication skills towards inexperienced and upset 
users. If you can't deal with such cases, you better ignore them, it is better 
for your health. :) 
 And if there pitfalls, common problems with your application in certain 
setups, document them and distribute to as many channels as possible (forums, 
wiki, mailing lists). People will learn to look at it. When somebody else has 
the same problem and asks on IRC, others can point to it, and it doesn't have 
to be you, the developer. This saves your time, the users time. 

If you think I don't know what I'm talking about, as I don't have experience, 
then:
- look at the bugzilla statistics and search for kmail
- look at the nice mails on kdepim mailing lists :)
- while I was working on another KDE app, years ago with a large use base (not 
that large as kmail though), I only remember one case when the user left 
upset. Yes, I spent time also on mail writing, not only coding, but this is 
"normal". And the app was not bug-free, still the users were nice and the 
communication happened in a nice atmosphere. This all depends on both sides.

Andras