Re: Linux 2.6.21

Indan Zupancic
2007-04-30T00:05:38Z

On Mon, April 30, 2007 01:41, Johannes Stezenbach wrote:
> Developers are just humans and if they have no incentive to
> act on a bug report they will ignore it. I think this is a
> fact that you have to deal with.

Reporters are just humans too and if they have no incentive to
post bugs they won't. So it's a lose/lose situation, really.
With a group of people working together they should try to
motivate each other, not demoralize everyone.

(I know, each bug report is a pain, voicing someone's failure.
So ignoring it might make people feel better, but it doesn't
fix anything.)

> It's also not necessarily the fault of the reporter if
> a bug report gets ignored, but for every report a developer
> has to make a decision to handle it or not, and there are
> lots of reasons why he may decide to not handle it, or
> at least not now (and then forget about it).

True. There's also a difference between a bad bug report and
one that a specific developer won't handle. In the former case
anyone could recognize it and tell the reporter about it. The
latter is a bit trickier, but if the developer thinks about
looking at it later, he better can tell the reporter just that.
A short "I'll take a look at it, later, when I've more time."
is so much better than plain silence.

> But I'm quite sure that an important bug would be reported
> again until fixed.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. What's worse, why would the
reporter bother telling that the bug is fixed in version N+1?
No one cared about it anyway, so there's no one to tell it to.
That would explain a lot open bugs too.

Greetings,

Indan