On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 11:15:55PM +0300, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> I've seen some of this same sentiment in discussions about
> bugs.debian.org. People think that having a hard-to-use bug tracker
> will keep the "noobs" away and maintain a higher quality of bug
> reports and discussions among the people who do pass the bar of
> figuring out how to use it. I think this is a very elitist attitude.
I have *definitely* see e2fsprogs and ext4 bug reports on Ubuntu and
kernel.bugzila.com and the problem is that (a) they are defnitely low
quality, and (b) there are a way more of them, and (c) I don't have
the bandwidth to deal with them. It's not a matter of lesser-skilled
people not deserving help --- but I just that I don't *have* the time
to deal with it all.
Again, you can try shaming me for not helping everyone who asks for
help on a web based fora --- or you can do help do the root causing
and triaging and provide free support for low quality bug reports.
Hower, the reality is, I *tried* looking at the bug reports, and I
just gave up, because I only have so much time, and if I'm trying to
help the most number of users, I consciously chose to focus on Debian
Bugs, because they are at least 3 to 5 times are more actionable.
If I'm helping out a Platinum user for $WORK, sometimes they send a
high quality bug report; and sometimes I have to spend days trying to
root cause their problem. But it's part of my day job, and I get paid
for it. (And, there is generally Level 3 support people who interface with the
customer and who helps get the information I need.)
For my volunteer time, which sometimes happen after midnight, or on
weekends, or when I'm on vacation on a cruise, I get to be selective
with how I spend my time, and choosing not spend ten times as much
time on a vague or badly formed bug report, is not good for the open
source users that I help using my volunteer time.
If you want to change that, I invite you to help me triage bug reports
and support requests on web-based bug systems. You can help respond
with FAQ for things that aren't bug reports, or work with users to get
the necessary information ---- basically, to provide the Level 1 and
Level 2 help desk role. Those are real jobs, and they aren't my core
strengths, and I *just* don't have the time. In the past, I've
partnered with Level 3 support desk folks at IBM's Linux Technology
Center, and they are actually much better at eliciting information
from customers. I can *do* the equivalent of L3 help desk work when
responding to Debian Bug reports, but the professionals who do L3
support full-time actally can do it much better than me. But sorry, I
chose not to spend my limited volunteer time doing L1 and L2 help desk
work.
> Also, I see a lot of bugs that have low-quality participation exactly
> because participants got past the barrier of figuring out how to
> interact with it, but didn't figure out how to do it properly and for
> example attach metadata on what is the upstream bug report URL
> correctly.
That can happen, and I'll generally respond asking for more
information, and in general, I never hear from them again. There are
a few of those languishing in the Debian BTS, but mercifully, there
are very few. There are orders of magnitude of more such low-qulity
bug open for e2fsprogs on Launchpad, the last time I checked, and
sorry, I'm not going to volunteer to do that kind of bug tracker
grooming grooming.
If you want to have a low barrier of entry, that's fine --- but who is
going to do the L1 and L2 support work?
> Also, when you went from discussing the utility of reviews in e-mail
> vs Forges to talking about people who don't use e-mail *at all*, and
> then mention software development driven by TikTok and Instagram, I
> think this discussion probably has seen the best arguments and we can
> conclude here.
That was your argument, right? That contributors who don't want to
use e-mail will go away? And we can't have that. And so we need to
ask Debian Deveopers to change their workflow to accomodate those
contributors?
If people want to submit bugs or contrbute code on Sourceforge, or
Github, or Launchpad, or Salsa against e2fsprogs, great! But I'm not
going to feel obliged to respond to all of them. I will sometimes
look to see if their are some valid code contrbutions or valid bug
reports; but the *vast* majority (90% plus) of them are cr*p. And I
don't have time to deal with it all. If you want to volunteer to do
that work for e2fsprogs or ext4, let's talk. But please don't
volunteer *my* time. That's not fair.
- Ted
