At http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting is is said that we should not send bugs to program authors, but to only Debian BTS. Imagine some system service reads configuration file, and has critical bug in parsing it. User cannot debug this. Maintainer closes this bug report with explanation "this is a bug in something else in your system" (for example, in an unknown backend library or GUI frontend). Critical bug will be closed and ignored, right?
2011/2/27 Josselin Mouette <j...@debian.org> > Le dimanche 27 février 2011 à 14:50 +0200, Dmitry Baryshev a écrit : > > Who should do this investigation? I did it because I know how to debug > > this. If user don't know how to debug this, his bug report will be > > closed without reassigning to proper package. Hence this investigation > > should be done by maintainer, not user. > > You seem to forget the very reason bug reports are here. Their point is > not to offer a service to our users - if you want that, you’ll need paid > support. Bug reports are here to help improving the distribution. > > Now, maintainers receive a lot of bug reports, and have limited time to > spare on Debian. Given the choice between: > 1. packaging a new upstream release that fixes a lot of bugs; > 2. fixing a nicely reported bug with a reproducible and > well-identified cause; > 3. investigating a dubious bug report that seems to be triggered by > a broken user configuration; > only masochistic maintainers will spend time on #3 when they can help a > lot more users on #1 and #2. It’s not that it’s easier (I remember > spending entire days on single bugs), but it’s more useful. > > Now, if you spend enough time investigating to be able to tell, at the > very least, “this is a bug in library foo which is reproducible by doing > bar”, your report might go from #3 to #2 and get fixed. > > Cheers, > -- > .''`. Josselin Mouette > : :' : > `. `' “If you behave this way because you are blackmailed by someone, > `- […] I will see what I can do for you.” -- Jörg Schilling > > -- Regards, Krasu
