On Sat Oct 11, 2008 at 20:12:26 -0400, Hal Vaughan wrote: > "Reported a number of bugs over time. Found the rule was not getting > useful responses, more often negative, or in some cases, hostile > responses, as opposed to positive or even neutral ones."
My apologies for simplifying too much. > The reason for including the anecdote was to make the point that I have > to receive bug reports and know what it's like on the other end, so I'm > not making statements out of ignorance. I think that's still largely irrelevant, I believe we're all clear on the ideal: A person who reports a bug should be thanked, and not treated badly. Whether you personally respond to bug reports with a song and dance is irrelevant to that ideal position. (e.g. I believe I mostly respond in a positive fashion to bug reports. But at the same time I'll happily ignore a report that says "Your program XXX doesn't work. You suck" because that's a user who hasn't done their part; they've not reported a bug. They've just insulted you randomly.) > I would too, but my experience tells me otherwise. Again, unfortunate. My experience differs. I guess the conclusion is some people respond to bug reports happily, others rudely, yet others not at all. You're certainly entitled to believe your reports have been handled badly, and choose to submit no more in the future. I hope that others do not make the same choice. > Overall, though, I think I've made my point: When one has had more > negative experiences than positive ones, there is no longer any > motivation to file bug reports and, in the long run, many FOSS projects > lose on that one. That could well be the case, it is hard to argue either way based on isolated anecdotal responses. (And ditto on the FOSS projects vs. proprietary project bug reports. Certainly the proprietary vendors would rarely insult their paying customers, but they may not necessarily resolve the bug in question.) Anyway I think I've clarified my previous mail sufficiently, so I'll happily stop now. I think we've probably both made our points sufficiently. The next thing to do is to either consider ways to help raise awareness of expectations on both sides of the bug-reporting fence, or report upstream instead of Debian if you feel that you're consistently failing to achieve resolution with us. (If that is possible; some code is clearly Debian-created, and as such upstream is Debian.) Steve --
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