Bug report 2.5G1

[Scott Raney]

On Sat, 05 Apr 2003 Wilhelm Sanke <sanke at hrz.uni-kassel.de> wrote:

> may I assume that I am not the only target of your reproach here? I just
> joined the queue of not less than eight "bug reports" during the last
> days. You know well that several times I reported bugs offlist and that
> we discussed them there.

Right, and that's the way it should be.  Nothing personal about you
being the one being "caught" posting reports to the list, maybe it was
just your post being the straw that broke the camel's back ;-)

> However, there may be indeed  instances when it is useful to present
> bugs to the list (not necessarily this time; so far I accept a
> reproach), because some "bugs" can be caused by hardware configurations,
> obsolete drivers or - as it were - "complicated" programming, so these
> need to be discussed on the background of the experience of other list
> members.

Certainly asking for confirmation of unreproducible problems is fair
game for the list, as is asking whether something really is a bug or
just an "undocumented feature".  Neither of these applied in this
case, though...

(snip)

> > While we don't have an official policy on public lobbying like this,
> > my personal opinion is that if we get any "me too" posts from others
> > wanting this feature they'd be given very little weight in our
> > decision making process as to which of the 300 or so features on the
> > feature-request list to implement for the next release.  After all, if
> > it was really important to people, they would have asked us for this
> > feature without having to be prompted...
> >
> Are you really saying that is not "politically correct" to voice one's
> opinion and ask others to join in if they are interested? And those that
> act like that will be punished?

I don't know that "punished" is the right word, but I can see how they
might find their efforts to be counterproductive.  I realize this
situation can be frustrating, but it's not nearly as bad as when we
Colorado citizens heard exactly the same kind of thing from our
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell in response to a recent letter writing
campaign by environmentalists opposed to drilling in the ANWR (he
basically said they were wasting their time because he discounts any
organized attempt to influence his voting).  While I can sympathize
with his position, IMHO it's not justified in the same way that ours
is: at least we periodically do a survey in which *everyone* is asked
what feature(s) they most need and so we really do have a pretty good
idea about what people really need.  If only our senators and
congressmen were so accommodating...
  Regards,
    Scott

> Regards,
> 
> Wilhelm Sanke

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
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