Re: Planned changes for bugzilla.kernel.org to reduce the "Bugzilla blues"

Theodore Ts'o
2022-10-01T01:18:34Z

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 07:47:26PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > Debian uses an email based bug tracker and you know what? Most people
> > avoid it like a plague. It's a hell on earth to use. Ubunutu's Launchpad
> > which looks and feels like Bugzilla is a hundred times more popular.
>
> It would be pretty sad if the only options we could come up with for bug
> tracking would be either popular with reporters and ignored by
> maintainers, or the other way around. Ideally we wouldn't have to decide
> which of those two classes of users to prioritize, but I fear that,
> given resource starvation, we'll have to make a decision there that will
> be unpopular with one of the two sides.

Funny thing. I've largely given up on getting any kind of useful bug
report from Launchpad, so I've largely ignored it. In contast, the
bug reports I get for e2fsprogs from Debian are generally far more
actionable, with bug reports that have all of the data so I can
actually root cause the problem, and help the user.

So Launchpad may be pretty, but perhaps because of selection bias, the
bug reports I've seen there are generally a waste of my time, and if
I'm going to choose which users I'm going to help for ***free***, it's
going to be the one which is far less frustrating to me as the
volunteer.

"100 times more popular" is not necessarily a feature if what we get
is 1000 times the noise.

> > Sometimes programmers have to realize that most people around are not as
> > smart as they are.

Given my personal experience having seen bug repors from Launchpad,
I'm sure that's true. The question is whether I want to engage with
people who can't me decent bug reports... (or who are just asking for
free consulting help; there's a lot of that too).

- Ted