On Fri, 16 Aug 1996, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> "Brian C. White":
> > By the way, for such tiny things, it's usually considered better
> > to just notify the maintainer instead of adding the overhead of
> > a full bug report.
>
> I disagree.
We seem to be divided fairly evenly on this issue.
> The bug list is not a shame pole!
Objections to reporting something as a bug are not founded on this
concept. No one feels personaly "put down" by a bug report. Those of us
who object to "trivial" bug reports are more concerned about the
distribution's public perception. The new user is apt to see a "security"
bug and a "blanks in description" bug as having equal weight. Large
numbers of outstanding bugs also leave new users feeling uncertain.
> It's a trivial way for
> users to reach maintainers -- there's only one address to remember.
No, the trivial way to reach maintainers is to start with debian-user.
Case in point:
Recently a user reported smtp problems with pine. This problem turned out
to be a configuration issue, unrelated to any functional problems with the
pine software. By reporting the "bug" on debian-user first, a non-bug bug
report was avoided.
> The address in the package might be out of date.
>
And it might not be...
> This has been discussed before, of course.
>
And it seems we will continue to disagree. I see no harm in encouraging
users to talk to me first about problems with my packages, and I will
continue to do so. I see no reason for those who disagree with this
attitude to continue to point it out.
If we really need to grind on the differences in our personal philosophy
we should probably do it on debian-private (or maybe just private mail).
Luck,
Dwarf
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