[Mageia-discuss] Mageia Forums

Wed Sep 22 23:00:32 CEST 2010

Marc Paré wrote:
+>
+> I think that I am not different than most other users. The life of
+> devs is a mystery to us. We often wonder how you spend your lives etc.
+> Maybe one of you could throw together a real-life mystery novel on the
+> "Live of a dev". LOL
+
+I'm a dev, although not very much here.  Devs want considered,
+structured input, and not several hundred one-line posts from
+technically uninformed people giving their personal opinion on technical
+issues.
+
+There's an old (and somewhat sexist) joke that has a guy telling his
+girlfriend, "if you want a problem solved, tell it to me; if you just
+want to vent, tell it to your girlfriends - that's what they're for". 
+There's a similar issue here.  Devs don't want to hear about how much
+time the bug cost you, or how foolish it made you look in front of your
+friends, or how you just won't be able to go on living if it isn't
+fixed, or your estimate of how many people are going to move from
+[distro-1] to [distro-2] because of this.  A Dev's concern is:
+
+  1) is it really something that should be fixed (in the philosophy or
+design of the project) ?
+  2) what is its priority relative to other work (this usually doesn't
+come from the user) ?
+  3) has the reporter done as much as possible to get the bug to the
+point where the Dev can work on it as opposed to researching the
+situation(s) that reproduce it ?
+
+Bug reports are as close to this as we're going to get.  Not all bug
+reports are good ones, granted.  But most of them are of much higher
+quality than hit-and-run comments in a forum.  They also have the
+advantage of getting quality input from a triage team member or a Dev
+early on, which avoids wasting users' time by pinpointing actions that
+can narrow the focus of the bug.
+
+