Daniel Drake posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:11:33 +0000:
> 2. Be careful with INVALID resolutions > > The term invalid _is_ harsh in bugzilla context, so make sure you write > a quick thankful-sounding comment to go with it. I like all the suggestions, but this one hits a particular sore spot, as I had it happen to me, with I think my second Gentoo bug filing. What made things worse is that the filing was after my arch team had asked for volunteers to perform specific tests (multilib-strict), and I had gone to significant effort to do so, having builds die that would otherwise have completed successfully. As it happens, the bug /was/ valid, and was eventually resolved (impressively quickly, I might add =8^) when I refiled it when the next version came out. I had something inadvised in my CFLAGS that the developer had seized upon as an opportunity to mark the bug invalid and get it out of his way, that in reality had nothing to do with the bug (a 64-bit shared object installed to lib instead of lib64, independent of CFLAGS, inadvised or not). Calling the bug "invalid" can be taken personally as saying the opinion and work that the user put into getting and filing the bug was "invalid", therefore, that the user shouldn't bother spending his time on Gentoo at all, as they don't matter and they and there opinion are "invalid". Consider this: INVALID is strong enough, under the wrong circumstances, that it /could/ set an emotionally unstable user off, causing them to commit suicide or something. I /know/ it was deeply depressing here, that first time, altho the effect on me would have been to simply push me back to Mandrake and cause me to become another anti-Gentoo activist, as I wasn't already suicidal. Some people /might/ be! One never knows the emotional state of someone filing a bug, so consider carefully the effect INVALIDating the bug might possibly have on their entire life. Would /you/ want that on your conscience, that it had been /your/ action, the marking of that one last bug they filed as INVALID, that finally tipped them over? I know I wouldn't! Obviously, I like the idea of NOTABUG better, or consider using WORKSFORME or WONTFIX. Those get the same general message across, without having the implication of INVALIDating the user's bug, possibly/likely conveying the message that they are not welcome as a Gentoo user, or worse yet to someone already unstable, that their whole life is INVALID. Thanks, Daniel! -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
