Can someone take a look?

[Felix Rohrbach]

Am 31.03.2013 15:39, schrieb Martin Graesslin:
> On Sunday 31 March 2013 15:10:56 Felix Rohrbach wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Am 30.03.2013 17:11, schrieb Martin Graesslin:
>>> On Saturday 30 March 2013 16:23:14 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
>>>> You can
>>>> always send an additional mail to the relevant developer list, but
>>>> that is generally not necessary, they do see the bug reports when they
>>>> come in.
>>>
>>> Be careful when doing that, it might get considered as insulting to the
>>> developers if you send a mail to the mailing list about a bug report. It
>>> might be considered as you try to make that report more important than
>>> the other reports. E.g. if you would do that to KWin it's a certain way
>>> to make sure that the bug report will never be fixed because it moves at
>>> the end of the todo list which is LIFO based.
>>
>> Imho, thats a wrong assumption by the developers. I've seen quite a few
>> cases where bug reports lie around for months, with mupltiple users
>> describing the bug, but no hint that a developer has even realized the
>> existance of the bug. I think it's a normal reaction to think "hmm,
>> maybe something went wrong with the bug report, I should ask someone
>> about that".
> In which case a note to the bug report would be enough. Either the devs look 
> at the bugs - then they will see that comment, or they don't. But then it also 
> doesn't make sense to send mails to the mailing list.
>>
>> Just to be clear, I don't want to blame the developers for not working
>> on that bug report. I know that there are too many bug reports and too
>> few developers. But please, see that from a bug reporters point of view,
>> a bug, which lies around months, state unconfirmed and no developer in
>> sight, might look like it just got lost. (Others might just feel
>> ignored, which is even worse)
> which shouldn't happen, if it happens there is a reason for it, like 
> overworked developers or too many bug reports. In that case sending mails to 
> the mailing list creates more work and doesn't help at all.
> 
> For such issues we need to fix the root problem - the reason why the bugs are 
> not answered and not try some cosmetics. If bugs are unanswered then there are 
> many bugs which are unanswered. Sending mails results in:
> 1.) Bugs where users send mail will get attention, all others won't
> 2.) For each bug a mail is sent to the mailing list
> 3.) devs will start to ignore the mailing list like they did ignore the bug 
> tracker
> 4.) Users start to mail devs directly because mailing to mailing list doesn't 
> help
> 5.) and so on and on.
> 
> We need to fix at the right place, that is the bug tracker. We know there are 
> issues, we need to find solutions to them without overloading the devs with 
> more work.
> 
I do agree about that, and I would really like to have an idea how to
fix it, but as someone who closed around 2-3 bugs on bko, I guess I'm
the wrong person. But when reading the discussions about bugs, I have
the feeling that the user's point of view is missing. I may be wrong
here, but I think good bug reports do help KDE and even make the life of
the developers easier. And if you have one good bug report about one
error, you may get less bad bug reports about that error.

You are more likely to get good bug reports by people who do report
regularly and/or who know their system and/or who already wrote software
themselves. But I think exactly those stop to write bug reports if they
feel ignored.

So all I'm asking is to respect the user's point of view in the
discussion, and that includes not to blame the user for working around a
broken system.

> Cheers
> Martin
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Regards,
Felix