Pete Zaitcev wrote:
When I find a bug in fedora and it's obviously a bug upstream I report it there. But do we have to report them in fedora bugzilla too and reference the upstream bugreport? So if an other users files a bugreport for the same bug and doesn't check upstream maintainer of the module know it's already filed upstream. Or do we have to notify the maintainer in other way?
It depends on the package, but usually the Fedora maintainer taps into an announcement list for the upstream project, so he sees those.
This does not preclude users from filing into our bugzilla. I used to do this in preference to upstream. The logics behind it was that we may be shipping a derivative, while the upstream only wants to hear about bugs reproduced on the pristine upstream. Maintainer filters and reports upstream such bugs. It is the way kernel operated, because it used to be noticeably divergent from its upstream. But for most packages it's not needed, so your way is better.
BTW, I like dups, because users often confuse same symptoms with same bug. I have dozens of people reporting "my kernel said ``ep0 timeout''" for dozens of wildly different problems, all ending in the same bug which can never be resolved. I would much prefer users filing dups than polluting unrelated bugs. But in X, the situation is the opposite: 100 dups for the same thing, and Mike Harris wants his users to search for dups and avoid filing new ones (if I understand him right).
Not exactly... For X, we experience both problems. We get many people reporting the exact same issue without them even bothering to check for duplicates, in which there is no question at all that it is the exact same issue. That is kindof irritating, in particular when there is a very large amount of work to do and deadlines pressing on us, and there are a million new bug reports to wade through, and find the master dupe for them, and close them all, etc.
However, we also get cases where someone reports "My Radeon crashes with new X update", which then some other person tacks on "yeah, my nvidia blah blah does that too, both with the original FCx release and with the update", then someone else "I have the same problem too! But with Trident!", then another nvidia user with a totally unrelated problem to any of the other people. They all have their X server crashing for various different unrelated reasons, but since the symptom sounds similar enough, they all pile on to one big report. Then when you ask the original reporter for their log/config or to try something specific to their problem - every one of them does it and reports back the results. Even if your advice was obviously specific to the radeon for example, an nvidia user will try it on their card, and perhaps complain that the option gave an error or something.
Very irritating. However, all of the userbase does not have the same technical skill level, or troubleshooting abilities, etc. so it is more or less a fact of life that we have to deal with. It's not as bad as it was at one point though, or at least it seems a bit better now. ;o)
The biggest problem we face as far as X is concerned though, is that at least the X server is like a part of the kernel, in the sense that it has a bunch of hardware drivers with all the idiosyncracies of hardware at play. A large number of driver related problems get reported in bugzilla, and our team does try to handle as many issues as we can, given the resource constraints we are under, however the number of bugs in the X server, drivers, xkb, etc. etc. vastly outstaggers the number of manhours our entire team probably 100:1 or worse. Many people insist on filing bugs in our bugzilla rather than X.Org bugzilla for issues that are not really distribution specific to Fedora Core however, and so they pile up over time due to a combination of lack of hardware, lack of manpower, and in many cases lack of reproduceability.
While some people are now reporting things directly to X.Org, the majority of driver issues still hammer into our bugzilla. The sad thing is that many of the issues could likely be fixed in a day, a week, or a month if reported to X.Org, simply because there are so much more many developers and hardware available upstream, etc.
Ah well, such is the toil of bugzilla. ;)