On 2023-03-01 16:30:01 +0100, Sam Hartman wrote:
Honestly, if there is not currently a submitter behind a bug---someone
who cares about it and is willing to look into requests for more
information or to help confirm a fix---I'm not particularly interested
in working on such a bug.
We’re all volunteers here. If someone doesn’t want to work
on a particular issue, they’re IMO at full liberty to not do
any such work. (There are exceptions, but ultimately, it boils
down to whether the person does or doesn’t want to put effort
into a particular issue / package / etc., possibly to the
detriment of their other commitments.)
To me, that's often a sign the bug should be closed until someone
comes along who cares about the issue enough to interact with it.
There are exceptions.
So I'd be fine with a nosubmitter command or similar, but also with
the understanding that it's entirely reasonable for maintainers
to close nosubmitter bugs as wontfix-until-some-specific-person-cares.
Socially and culturally I do want to emphasize the idea that if you
aren't willing (any more) to put energy behind your problem report,
it's entirely fine if no one is going to put energy behind fixing it.
Having a bunch of problem reports that no one is interested in
cluttering up package pages has a cost. Just for the same reasons
you don't want these reports cluttering up your bugs from page,
I perhaps don't want them cluttering up my bugs on my package
pages if you no longer care.
My long-time opinion is that so long as the bug is reproducible,
and does affect Debian users, it’s ought to be in the BTS, open.
The maintainer(s) can of course indicate their lack of desire
to invest effort into solving the issue via the wontfix tag;
no opposition to that.
For an example, I’ve once spent hours trying to determine the
cause of a particular problem I was having. Turns out
tinysshd(8) from Bullseye has an interoperability issue with
openssh-client from the same. It would’ve likely helped me
if #1006801 were listed on
http://bugs.debian.org/src:tinysshd .
(I’m not entirely sure as to /why/ it got archived, TBH:
it’s found in 20190101-1, which is still in the archive, and
fixed in 20220305-1; as such, I’d expect it to remain open
until Bullseye itself is archived.)
The problem with the logic quoted above is that a bug that the
original submitter isn’t interested in can still be affecting
those who use Debian now; and, unless fixed, can still affect
those who will use Debian at some later point. The absence of
a /record/ of a person interested in the issue is not the same
as the absence of such a /person/ themselves.
Personally, I find Debian BTS to be a valuable source of what
issues there /are./ On occasion, I’d choose between two
packages based on what bugs are filed for each. Othertimes,
I’ll find workarounds there. Or I might find why a particular
issue is infeasible to fix in a given package, and start
searching for another option for the task at hand.
It’d be sad to see Debian BTS devolve into a bunch of
maintainers’ personal TODO lists.
--
FSF associate member #7257
http://am-1.org/~ivan/
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