Re: bugs filed on Firefox

On Monday 2007-07-02 23:34 -0700, Ray Kiddy wrote:
> I am sorry, but I do not think it is necessarily the responsibility  
> of someone who is trying to file a bug to see if there are others  
> like it.

I think this comment displays a fundamental misunderstanding of open
source development.  Open source is not democracy.  It's not about
rights and responsibilities.  The fundamental principle of open
source is that anyone who thinks they can do a better job has the
ability to demonstrate that they actually can.  It's the ability to
fork.

If you think your bug system that has thousands (more) poorly
described and duplicate bugs is likely to produce a better product
than our current bug system where such bugs are not considered
acceptable, you're welcome to create one, and try to attract
developers to fixing the bugs in it.

But the fact is, Mozilla developers have enough well-reported bugs
to fix already.  We're more likely to fix well-reported bugs
both because they're easier to fix and because we want to encourage
more contribution to Mozilla, in the form of spending more time to
write better bug reports.

> Just because developers do not want to do bug triage, and it  
> is not fun for anyone, that does not mean users should.

Why do you think the bug triage is done by developers?  Given the
number of bugs we already get, and the amount of work needed to make
sense of them, making the developers do all the bug triage would
mean they wouldn't have any time left for development.  (Does that
help explain why we don't want more?)

> After all, if  
> a bug gets filed a bunch of times, should it not get fixed?

Ah, another fallacy that I've heard many times from people who
haven't done programming on large projects with shifting
requirements.  Fixing a bug isn't typically just a matter of finding
a "+" that should have been a "-".  It's often a lot of work.  It
can involve implementing a new feature that wasn't implemented
before.  It can involve redesigning a significant piece of code.

And the number of people who file a bug report isn't the same as the
number of people who care about the bug, and neither is the same as
the actual importance of the bug.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/