Re: Tracking and crediting bug reporters

["Roland" <devzero@web.de>]

On Monday, 12 of May 2008, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Several members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board 
> recently
> got together with Andrew Morton to talk about kernel quality issues.  One
> of the things which came out of that meeting was a desire to improve
> incentives for people who report bugs.  Clearly, actually fixing those 
> bugs
> would qualify; nobody has lost sight of that.  But it was suggested that
> the creation and publication of statistics on bug reporting would also
> help.
>
> One way to do this might be for Andrew (being the only one who actually
> reads every message posted on the list) to keep a spreadsheet along with
> everything else he does.  That idea did not go over very well.
>
> So here's what we would like to try instead.  Whenever somebody sends up a
> patch fixing a reported bug, the name of the person who reported the bug
> would be immortalized with this tag:
>
> 	Reported-by: A. Bug Reporter <email@goes.here>
>
> In particular, reporters who work with the developers toward the 
> resolution
> of the bug should be thanked in this way.  If we wanted to take things
> further, perhaps we could add a Bisected-by: tag for really hard-core
> helpers.
>
> If these tags go into the commit messages in any sort of consistent way, 
> it
> should be possible generate the usual sort of statistics from them.  I'll
> then happily publicize them next to the traditional lists of people who 
> are
> adding new bugs.  The result will certainly be fame, fortune, and job
> offers for the people at the top of the list.  Or something like that.
>
> If the rest of the community is agreeable, it would be nice to make an
> immediate start on this; it's not yet too late to get reasonable data for
> the 2.6.26 kernel, and to have the habits well ingrained for 2.6.27.
>
> Thoughts?

very good idea !

anyhow, i`m browsing trough bugzilla for some time and try helping
where i can and there is one thing which is really noticeable:

there are bugreports not being worked on systematically enough and
reporters often don`t feel welcome there.
i saw bug reports which didn`t get a reply for a year or so.
somebody excused for "posting so much" - all he did was posting a
proper description of his problem.

improving of bugzilla handling would be another incentive for bug reporter,
imho.

someone who reports a bug there and never gets a response (not even a formal
"thanks for your report....") will probably never report again.

i have worked for support (software product) some time ago and i
learned one thing there:

there needs to be someone to keep track of the users` input and to keep
track of the developers action/response.

bugreporters forget about their bug if they found a workaround (buying
new hardware or whatever) and developers mostly prefer working on
new code rather than fixing issues. that`s not true for ever user or 
developer,
but if you really want bugs get fixed, someone acting as a mediator is 
essential.
.
regards
roland