[Techtalk] Re: Projects that respond well to bug reports

Wim De Smet kromagg at gmail.com
Tue Feb 13 22:02:12 UTC 2007


On 2/13/07, Kathryn Andersen <kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 11:39:21AM -0500, Felicia Berryman wrote:
> > Well, I'm about to see if bugzilla responds well to their own bug
> > reports.  I wrote the cheesiest enhancement request ever...
> > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370278
> > Feel free to leave your comments on the report.  I wonder what will
> > happen with this.  It's a huge request.
>
> And it's already been marked as a duplicate of a much *smaller* request
> (to provide a "random bug" feature).  And the "random bug" feature seems
> to be considered a toy, and not something *useful* at all.
>
> (sigh)
>

Yes, I agree it's bad marking. When something like that happens it's
best to add a comment like "I do not believe this is a duplicate of
bug so-and-so for the following reasons <list>". At least I've done
that before and had great success with it, YMMV. People sorting the
bugs are sometimes a bit trigger happy but they'll often revert their
changes after realising you're right. At the very least it can make
them explain their reasoning behind the duplicate marking.

Sometimes it also turns into a major bug tug-o-war between developers
and users which can be fun but of an entirely different kind. As
happened with the infamous red hat bug 119185 [1] about rpm losing its
installation database. It's like something out of Kafka.

greets,
Wim

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119185


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