I like receiving (some) bug reports
I suddenly realised that I like receiving bug reports. In a recent bout of structured procrastination I fixed more or less all the bugs I could fix in my packages (except ppp. I don't feel like working on ppp right now, does anybody want to help me?) and now this is a quiet period. Obsessively checking the bugs mailbox for new messages is a clear withdrawal symptom.
I am addicted to bugs for a very simple reason: they are a challenge. I stopped working on mutt because it was not interesting anymore to me and then I adopted ppp and packaged udev because I tough that maintaining them would require solving many interesting problems. It's too bad that solving some needs the collaboration of other developers, but this will be the topic of a different rant.
But not all bugs are an interesting challenge. Some are just a total waste of my time, which usually is much more valuable than the time of the submitter. I will show some examples.
- Obscure bugs which I cannot debug and need repeated interactions with the upstream developers trying to debug them. OK, you submitted the bug and I am sorry that I cannot help more than this, but I told you where you can find somebody who cares. Now please do not expect me to forward emails back and forth from the BTS and upstream developers. This is not only very inefficient for you and for the people who are trying to help you, but also wastes my precious time.
- Features to be forwarded to the upstream maintainer. I am a Debian developer, not your personal assistant. Forwarding your feature request, which probably will never be implement because it is crazy, useless or just needs more work than it is available wastes my precious time. And then I will waste even more every time I will be distracted by seeing it in the BTS, and curse you for continuing to waste my time.
- Trivial upstream bugs like spelling errors. It is highly improbable that I will consider them important enough to be worth fixing with a patch in the Debian packaging, so what about you do not waste my precious time and just report them to the upstream maintainers?
- Requests for useless changes to the packaging. If it is useless and you do not even care enough to implement it, what makes you believe that I will? (Yes, I will decide what is useful.)
- Multiple reports about the package being totally broken. If an important package is obviously broken (often broken as in "the system will not boot") then probably somebody else will have already submitted a bug report. It is your duty to check for open bugs before reporting a new one, and merging or closing duplicate bugs wastes my precious time.
- Bogus reports showing that you did not RTFM.
- Bogus reports showing that you have no grasp of how the package works. Especially if I explained the issue in the README.Debian file.
- Unreproducible reports where every clue points to a PEBKAC and the reporter still does not promptly follow my instructions for trying to confirm the bug.
So, if you can follow these simple rules I will probably not flame you to ashes the next time you will report a bug on one of my packages.