Re: Why are some Debian bugs ignored for a long time?
On 8/20/2022 2:06 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > So that means "free" software written and maintained by volunteers will never be as
> > stable and secure as software that is written by people who are paid by the hour.
>
> Not necessarily. Have you filed a bug report about a problem you
> perceived in macOS, Windows, other your usual shrink wrapped software?
> Has it always been fixed promptly?
>
> If you want your bugs to be fixed, you generally need resort to some
> kind of support contract, which you can get for Free Software just as
> easily as for proprietary software (probably more easily, actually).
>
> Notice also that the goal of Free Software is not to be technically
> better (you may be confusing it for Open Source software), but
> ethically better.
>
> I suspect most maintainers who don't respond promptly to bug reports
> aren't happy about that fact: its demoralizing to be in charge of
> something you can't devote the resources it really deserves.
>
> But note that *you* can help, by taking on some of the work, looking for
> bugs that haven't gotten an answer yet and trying to address them.
That's a fair point. It may not be so easy for me to work on a bug that does not affect
my systems, but I am willing to help with bugs important to the Debian project now, as
the bookworm development process continues. I will take some time and see if I can
help out with some other open bugs that do not directly affect my systems. Such bugs
can be found by querying BTS for bugs marked as critical or grave by the maintainer
and bugs that are blocking a release, as these are the ones most important to the
maintainers and developers. I don't know if I have the skills to fix such bugs which are
probably not so easy to fix, but it wouldn't hurt to ask if there is anything I can do to
help. One thing that is always helpful are testers to test the proposed fixes for open
bugs, and I could help with that in cases when the bug affects a package on one or more
of my systems, at least to tell the maintainer, "that proposed fix looks good, it does not
break anything on my systems."
Thanks,
Chuck
> I don't think anyone can do that for any random bug, but I'm pretty sure
> most people on this list would be able to do that for at least one of
> the pending bug reports.
>
>
> Stefan
>
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