On the Democratic Operation of Bugzilla

[Sarah Reichelt]

On 2/25/06, David Vaughan <dvk at dvkconsult.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 25/02/2006, Garrett Hylltun <garrett at paraboliclogic.com> and
> Gregory Lypny <gregory.lypny at videotron.ca> wrote stuff.
>
> Sorry to others for some repetitious elements in here but I see a
> couple of basic themes in the offerings from Garrett and Gregory
> (principally the former) which I wish to answer.

Hear, hear! What a splendid email. I agree 100%.

And this is where the bug voting comes into play. As someone mentioned
earlier in this debate, it is possible to find and report a bug so
trivial or so easy to bypass, that the interest in fixing it is zero.
On the other hand, I find bugs that are important to me, and I see
someone else has reported it earlier. I still like to be able to log
the fact that this is important to me, even if I can't be the original
reporter.

>
> Yet, every now and then, I see a window appear on my machine. It
> says: "Would you like to report this problem to Apple?"

Yes, and if it appears for Safari or any other Apple app, that's fine
and I send off the report, but if it's Photoshop or something else, I
see no point in sending the report to Apple, but I have no way of
logging the problem with the actual developer.

To digress slightly, I think the reason Rev appears to have so many
bugs is because it is so versatile. We all use Rev in different ways
to do widely different projects. I ignore some bugs because I never do
the things they refer to. Others find the same bugs to be project
blockers. Then again, some people use Rev in a way that the
development team never imagined. That's great, but it means they will
be the first to strike bugs in those areas. By comparison, testing a
single-use application like a word-processor should be simple, but
they still crash :-)

I wonder is the Rev team doing itself a disservice by letting all Rev
users access the bug reports? While most people seem to value the
chance to point out problems and influence future versions, some
people regard a public bug list as an admission of failure. Maybe it
would be better to restrict bugzilla to members of the improve-rev
list or make it by invitation only.

Just a few random thoughts,
Sarah