On Wed, 2016-09-14 at 12:51 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Abou Al Montacir <abou.almonta...@sfr.fr> writes: > > > Because you think people will not be frustrated if they experience a bug > > and that we prevent them to raise bugs? Hiding reality is always > > bad?. Look at the original reporter last message. He seems quite > > disappointed by the project reaction. He should feel as we don't care > > about our users. I personally sometimes feel the same. > > However, this is unavoidable for that sort of bug report. As much as > anyone might like the situation to be different, Debian is not going to be > able to act on a bug report with that little information complaining about > a whole-system problem. All that would happen if we didn't close the bug > is that it would just be ignored forever, which I think is even worse. There are little information because the guy reporting the bug, or the other one suffering from it (me) does not know how to debug such a bug.
In my case, when I get such a report for my package, I start instructing the user to gather more information. Later, if the user does not help I wait maybe other users see the bug and help reproducing. If after several months none react then I tag it and close it. If it happens someone reopen it I'm glad again to hunt it. > This is the reality of a volunteer project with limited time for triage of bugs that haven't been traced technically to the faulty component. Sometimes (rarely) someone will have the free time and desire to do that tracing, but that can happen as easily (or more easily) on debian-user, and isn't how we use the bug system. bug system is meant to track issues, not to debug them. If an issue is there it should appear, especially in an open source project. We don't care to loose customers because of an issue faced by someone, but we are transparent enough to tell users that someone discovered that and they may fall in it. > Debian's bug system is a tool we use to improve the distribution, not a user support channel. We should not retain bugs that do not help us achieve that. It would be great if it could also be a user support channel, but this is just unachievable for a volunteer-maintained distribution like Debian, and we should avoid creating the impression that we promise to do this. Does improve distribution means hiding issues? I don't think it is. -- Cheers, Abou Al Montacir
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