Dave Jones wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 01:14:44PM -0500, John Ellson wrote:
Its incredibly frustrating and demoralizing to report a bug to Fedora, only to have the Fedora maintainer close the bug with the response that the user (what a dummy!) should have reported it upstream! Yes, this has happened to me.
I propose that it be a policy that Fedora maintainers are themselves responsible for forwarding the bug upsteam if necessary. At the same time the status of the Fedora bug can be left open with tracking information to the upstream bug.
In a lot of cases, users working directly with upstream instead of having someone playing middle-man is going to get things turned around a lot faster. Especially in cases where the bug relates to a specific piece of hardware, for eg.
Yes, agreed, I'm not suggesting anything that would get in the way of a sophisticated user who is knowledgeable about who is responsible for what in a given package from contacting upstream directly.
I more interested in the general user, or a user unfamiliar with a particular package, having a single-point-of-contact. I'm interested in not having reports discarded and lost just because they not immediately fixable by the Fedora maintainer.
What would be *really* awesome would be the possibility of having a facility in bugzilla to escalate a bug to upstream, so a couple of clicks, and the bug is entered in the appropriate bugzilla, with all comments being reflected back into the one the user entered the bug into. I believe there is some work going on in this area, but it's slow moving.
That would be great, but I wonder if its overly complicated and perhaps thats why its not happening?
I think most of the problem could be fixed by means of a Fedora Policy, and/or by changing the meaning of "UPSTREAM" status in Bugzilla.
Dave
John