will trillich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 01:16:50PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> 4) Don't make any requests unless you can help to carry them out yourself. >> (By that logic, I can't report bugs in Apache, since I can't fix them, >> and I shouldn't request documentation unless I have the time to write it). > >Needs some fine-tuning... how about: "DON'T make any DEMANDS, >EXPECTING to be entitled to someone else's time or attention; and >unless you're WILLING TO RECIPROCATE, don't even expect others to >volunteer theirs to help you." > >After all, why should they?
Mmm. You see two extremes of bug reports if you trawl through the bug tracking system a bit. There are the ones every maintainer likes: ones that calmly describe what happened, what the surrounding bits of their system looked like, what the maintainer needs to do to reproduce the bug. At the other extreme, there are the reports that go "my system broke! What the hell did you think you were doing! You're obviously a clueless weenie", etc., etc. Frankly, the latter tend just to get closed without paying much attention to them, as life's too short, and if you do that often enough you're liable to get ignored all the time. However, people who don't waste time with rants about how pathetic the maintainer is will often find that bug reports are welcomed. It doesn't matter if you can't fix the bug yourself; that's what the maintainer signed up for anyway. What matters is giving the maintainer enough information to know what's wrong, and what he/she can do about it. That doesn't require a great deal in the way of technical skills (it's often just following instructions), but all the same it's helping. You don't have to send patches to be helpful (not that it isn't nice when people do). I'll repeat Karsten's endorsement of Simon Tatham's "How to Report Bugs Effectively" (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html), which says this and much more, and is a lot more entertainingly written to boot. Applying this to documentation, "all the documentation is useless" has to be filed in the bit-bucket, because there's nothing else you can do. Where would you start? However, "I had trouble doing foo, maybe I managed to work it out and here's what I did, if someone who knows what I really should have done could write it up properly it'd be great" is much closer to what helps the documentation people do their job well. >When i started with Debian i sent a few "what the hell am i >supposed to do now" flares to debian-user, and apparently i >didn't do it quite right, because most of them still respond to >me. :) Heh, I remember it well. :) -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
