Bart Schouten <l...@xenhideout.nl> writes: > I think the point that people are trying to get across is that a lot of > what you say Russ feels like excuses.
An excuse is when you know you should do something but aren't going to do so, and are trying to justify that decision to oneself. That's not the disagreement here; rather, we have a very fundamental disagreement over what people should do. You believe that I should be doing certain things in bug management, and I don't agree with you. It's not an excuse for me to tell you that I'm not going to do the thing you want me to do because I think you're wrong. :) It's a way for me to say "I don't agree with you and you haven't convinced me." I'm not really sure how much point there is in continuing to discuss this, since I don't think either of us are particularly likely to change each other's minds. I hear what you're saying about what you believe people's perceptions are. I don't agree that this is how our bug system is designed, that those perceptions are a particularly serious problem in Debian, or that any change is really needed here. It's not that I'm not hearing you; it's just that I don't agree. If we had some other state in our bug system other than closed that also gets the bug off my view and makes it disappear from the various tracking statistics on, say, the Debian package tracker that I'm trying to keep clean, I would probably use it because I'm kind of obsessive about classifying things. If you give me a classification system, I'll probably try to use all of it, even if that's not a particularly good use of my time. :) So in that sense I'm agnostic about whether we want to spell "this bug is highly unlikely to get fixed" as "closed" or as "on-hold" or as something else. If someone changed the BTS, I'd shrug and change what I do. But I don't feel like this is necessary or particularly important. What is important to me are two points: one, that we (as much as possible; this is hard, for all the reasons pointed out in this thread) tell people if their bugs are unlikely to ever be looked at if this is the case rather than just silently ignoring them, and two, that we be very clear that the existence of a bug (particularly a non-RC bug) does not create an obligation for the maintainer to fix it. We all want to fix bugs, but we do that as part of a volunteer project; people aren't always going to have time, energy, or desire, and that has to be okay, or we will lose the volunteer efforts of people who would be able to contribute occasional work but who don't want to incur the obligations of letting Debian maintainer work turn into a second job. (And yes, that means that we should be much more open to NMUs and change our historical baggage around that. Please NMU my packages if there are bugs I'm not getting to! Although ideally talk to me first, since there may be design reasons why I didn't fix the bug, not just an issue of insufficient time.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
