Bisection divides users and developers

If you're unhappy with how your distro provides support, that realistically is between you and
your distro.

The upstream project has to draw a line somewhere. I totally agree that blindly asking for
"please test the tip" isn't the right thing, that's just pushing people away for now. At the
same time, if someone, say, reports a bug in the 2.6.9 kernel, it's also not realistic for
kernel developers to work on that. I consider it a reasonable request to the user to at least
use the last or last-but-one released versions; if you're using something earlier it can mean
pretty much two things:
1) you rolled your own - you should be able to roll a more recent version
2) you're using a distro package and don't know how to use a newer version - you should see if
the distro support can help you

Most healthy projects move so fast that a 2 year old version is no longer useful for the
developers to spend time on. This is part of the prioritization thing the articile mentioned:
as developer you end up spending your debug time on those reports which have the highest value
for the time invested. That is a combination of
1) a sufficiently diagnosed bug
2) a bug that hits many people
3) a bug that has a high probability of being unfixed still
   (and the fix being applicable to your development codebase)
4) a bug that can easily be reproduced

The more vectors a bug scores on, the more likely a developer will spend time on the bug. And
that's ok in my view... 

I guess there's a difference between a bug report and a support request.

Clearly if a bug has been found, a bug report explaining how to reproduce it is not
incomplete.  All you need is instructions on how to reproduce the behaviour, and evidence from
documentation (or from wise people) that it is indeed a bug.

However if you expect something to be done to fix the bug, you have to rely on someone being
motivated to fix it.  That could be the project maintainer as a labour of love, or it could be
someone you pay for support.  Or if you are not paying cash, you may be expected to do some of
the work yourself, for example running git bisect.

Similarly, if the ancient foo-1.2 release is still being 'maintained', then any bug report
against that version is valid.  But to get support you may be expected to put in some work
yourself checking out the very latest code.  I agree that this can be offputting and some
projects are surely losing out on help they might get from users, by making the users jump
through too many hoops.

I've had similar experience even dealing directly with vanilla kernels (full story at
http://kerneltrap.org/Quote/Quality_of_the_Bug_Report ). Long story short, despite working
pretty hard to pinpoint a regression that took days to reproduce, no developer even bothered
to have a look at what could have been broken.