Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2018 08:41:16 +0200 (CETDST) From: Kristoffer Eriksson <ske@pkmab.se> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: imp@bsdimp.com, dieterbsd@gmail.com, phk@phk.freebsd.dk, kristof@sigsegv.be Subject: Re: PRs are being closed for bogus reasons :-( Message-ID: <201806020841.aa01298@berenice.pkmab.se> In-Reply-To: <BF6F6F01-70A9-4BDF-BB29-F76F43AB57AC@sigsegv.be> from "Kristof Provost" at Jun 1, 18 05:27:28 pm
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On Jun 1, 2018 at 17:27, Kristof Provost wrote: > On 1 Jun 2018, at 17:09, Warner Losh wrote: >> Well, not quite true. I've had several people send me pointers to >> bugs over the years and engage me when I tell them that the patch >> isn't quite right. >> That conversation is easier, to my mind, in Phabricator, though. >> There's no substitute for making good connections and motivating >> volunteers to want to help you. That gives much better results >> than filing and forgetting and hoping for the best. As a committer, >> I find it a low return on investment to go looking at random PRs. >> I find it a much higher return on investment when I have a history >> with someone (even a short one). ... > For better or worse, the fact is that both patches and bug reports > fare better if their submitter actively advocates for them. > > I don't mean to suggest that it is somehow the fault of the submitter > if bugs don't get fixed. Instead I want to point at this as something > people can do to help, even if they don't have commit access, or even > if they don't know how to read or write code. As a submitter of a few bug reports in bugzilla, it would have been extremely useful to me if there had been some hints somewhere in the bug report submission process about what I could do to follow up and promote that report (or fix) to relevant people or forums, in stead of only finding that out much later when asking on the mailing list for any response. As a first-time submitter, you naturally assume that after submitting a good detailed bug report, your job is done, and that there is really nothing more you can do (for those who are not able to fix the bug themselves). Nothing in bugzilla gives any reason to think otherwise (as far as I remember). And that is very misleading. Maybe(?) there is some information about that somewhere else, but you really can't read absolutely everything there is in the whole project before submitting a bug report. - Also, for those who are able to also submit patches together with their bug reports, maybe more could be done to guide them on how to improve their patches on the way to a more committable state? But preferrably not in a way that discourages people from submitting anything at all. I would guess that many times, a patch submitted by a bug reporter may just be meant to serve as a proof or example that the bug is real and goes away if certain changes are made to the source code, and not necessarily as a production quality committable fix. Or anything in between those two. Even then, having a patch should be much better than having nothing, for the maintainer (or who-ever tries to fix the bug) to work with, but not necessarily meant to be committed as-is. Maybe it would be helpful if the submitter would be asked to self- grade what they think their patch is good for, on some kind of scale? Or indicate what steps they have already done (or not done) themselves in the process from plain bug report to submittable patch, if a couple of such steps could be suggested. - Another question that occurs to me: Who is it that is supposed to take an interrest in the bug reports? Is just any random volunteer supposed to come by, who doesn't know anything, and look at them if they feel like it? And then be able to fix them? That doesn't seem very likely to happen. Maybe occasionally, but not sustainably. I would think that if there was a bug report relating to some code created or maintained by a specific person or group of persons or some upstreams project, then the chances would increase significantly if the report was sent raight away to that group of people. For instance, if I would have created some small part of the FreeBSD software, or ported some software to it, or if some other woftware that I created would be ported to FreeBSD, then I would like to receive any bug reports relating to that specific part. (Personally I would even be interrested if there were some bug reports in the same parts of code that I have submitted patches for before, which I have indeed done.) Does that not happen in bugzilla? Doesn't bugzilla have any information about who maintains or who created various parts of the project? Regards/Kristoffer Eriksson
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