Re: Linux 2.6.21

Stefan Richter
2007-04-29T09:36:07Z

David Lang wrote:
> I'll say that as a user I hate having to deal with bugzilla.
>
> there's nothing more frustrating then spending a good chunk of time
> trying to find a similar bug, then jumping through all the bugzilla
> hoops to file a report to eventually (days/weeks later) get a message
> 'closed becouse it's a duplicate report), then have to go and track down
> what it's a duplicate of, read through that bug report, only to find
> that it's not solved there either, and to top it off, the people working
> on that bug won't see my report or that I'm available to troubleshoot it.

Ideally, joining duplicate reports should be a low-cost, lossless operation.

That said, when bug B is marked as duplicate of bug A, people at bug A
at least get a link to bug B, aren't they? If they are too lazy to read
the report B, they obviously are not very interested in A either. Tough
luck. Vice versa, people at bug B get notified that the matter is now
continued at bug A and can add their Cc there. Of course that addition
is one of the very few things that could probably be automated.

Joining duplicate reports at a mailinglist involves responding to
multiple threads and send links into web archives of the list, which
happens to be redundant to and disparate from your local e-mail storage.
I can't see how this aspect of bug-handling works easier on mailinglists.

> from a user poit of view, e-mailing the kernel list (retrying a few days
> later of there is no response) tends to work _much_ better.

What I from a maintainer's POV agree with is that a report to the
appropriate mailinglist is often easier to triage than a report at
bugzilla, because the reporter often needs initial help to properly
define the problem. Bugzilla becomes useful after a report reached a
minimum level of quality (after minimum initial triage) and if the bug
can be clearly associated with a maintained subsystem of the kernel (as
e.g. Linus already pointed out in this thread).
--
Stefan Richter
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