Bug trackers and kernel development [LWN.net]

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 19:53 UTC (Thu) by melauer (guest, #2438)
Parent article: Bug trackers and kernel development

>According to David (and others), the lossy nature of mailing list bug
>reporting is actually a feature. Bug reporting, it is said, is a process
>similar to patch submission. Users who do not get satisfaction from a bug
>report should resubmit it. If the bug is not important enough for the user
>to "maintain" the report, it's not worth a whole lot of effort to fix.

I see how this works. If I really want a bug fixed, I should keep nagging the developers (sorry, I mean "maintaining my report") until they get so sick of me that they fix the bug just to get me off their backs. Brilliant!

Seriously, though, my experience has been that most developers want to have bugs reported to them just once, and do not want to receive repeat e-mailings about a single bug from one person. Multiple bug reports from different users is a different story, of course. Still, could it be that this approach to bug reporting reflects a particular code-maintainence style, one which is not shared by all developers?

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Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 21, 2003 4:26 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Multiple bug reports from different users is a different story, of course

No, they hate that too. I know I do. It's like having your coding failure or debugging failure repeatedly thrown up to you. That's where a working bug database is nice. It allows a user to see that the problem is already being worked on and leave the developer to do it in peace.

As a user, I also use bug tracking systems to save time reporting bugs to a project that doesn't fix them. I browse the open bugs and if I see a lot of attention being paid to bugs, I go ahead and take the time to gather information and type in in. If I see a lot of ancient reports with no followup, I don't bother.