Octavio Alvarez wrote: > Reporting the bug has turned pointless now; you know what happens: > incomplete debugging information makes it more difficult for upstream. > That's why if I report a bug without a full backtrace, chances of the > bug being disregarded as NEEDINFO raise significantly. And upstream > will just blame the reporter.
Which coreutils bug are we talking about here?
I looked for your address in the upstream lists but didn't see it
after a very brief search. Perhaps I missed something?
> So "return of investment" is not delimited to you; it is for the whole
> community. You help me, I help upstream, easier to have the bug fixed
> for everybody ("everybody" >= Debian).
Most of the coreutils programs are interfaces between the kernel and
the user. For coreutils reading the lists of programs is like reading
the list of kernel system calls. This is different from many other
software projects that get packaged for Debian.
The most important thing is to create a small repeatable test case
that will recreate the problem behavior. Then it can be recreated and
fixed.
With coreutils programs a large portion of the time the only
information needed is to know the strace of the command to know what
values the kernel returned to the utility. Less often there will be
logic in the program that has gone astray. Often it will be external
kernel changes that cause bad behavior and code needs to be improved
to deal with the changing environment. Quite often bugs are reported
that are simply misunderstandings of shell globbing, but I digress.
> > And by the way... It would be nice if the original subject were
> > maintained. With just a ping about a bug number it means everyone
> > needs to go look up the bug number. It would be nicer if it the
> > subject had told us coreutils-dbg as in the original report.
>
> Will surely keep that in mind and suggest an easy fix to the Debian
> BTS: append ?subject=SUBJECT to the "Reply" link. Thanks for pointing
> it out.
That is a good suggestion for the web interface. It would be nice if
it did include the subject in the html mailto.
What I do is that I usually download the mailbox. Then read the
mailbox and reply to the messages that way. Everything is a mail
message that way and threading is preserved.
Bob
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