Re: Linux 2.6.21

Linus Torvalds
2007-04-29T18:59:06Z

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
>
> - You are required to select a category and 'component' for your report, which
> often is difficult (especially if you're not a kernel expert)
> - You need to have a bugzilla account (or to create one, if you don't)

Amen.

Both of those are show-stoppers. It may be ok for kernel developers, but
it's not good for random people. It's one of the reasons I don't generally
use bugzilla for other projects - if they require me to sign up etc, they
can take care of their own bugs.

(For the same reason I consider closed mailing lists to be useless for
bugreports. If you have to be a member to send email, it's not a
bug-report thing, it's just a secret society).

I realize that spam is a problem, but there are better spam solutions than
alienating the people who just want to send a report.

Also, I don't know if anybody has ever tried to avoid sending duplicate
bugs, but every time I use bugzilla to send a bug-report (which I do for
things like FC7 live CD's breaking etc where I care enough, and I have a
bugzilla account on that bugzilla _anyway_ for other reasons), I am ready
to _kill_ somebody whenever I see that "humorous"

zarro bugs found

message, after it made it almost impossible for me to even figure out how
to do a good search in the first place!

So I gnash my teeth, and fill in the bug report anyway, and if it's a
duplicate becasue bugzilla didn't have any sane way to get any kind of
overview at all, hey, it's a duplicate. Nothing I can do about it.

And the reason I gnash my teeth is that I realize that because I can't
even get any overview of the bugzilla entries as a random submitter (and
dammit, I probably have a better idea of what the problem might be than
most people), I sure as hell can't expect a random user to be better. So I
bet my bad reports are a lot better than the average, and a lot of people
probably just give up and don't report anything at all.

Linus