Is bugzilla worth keeping?

[Paul van Schayck]

Hey,

I'm one of those end-users following development closely. But I rarely 
post here. I've submitted two bugs in the bugzilla system. One was 
directly taken up by Lionel and fixed quickly. On the second one I did 
not get a respond. Here it is (ALSA record problem):
http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2046

Mike Hearn wrote:
> It strikes me, looking at the wine-bugs list, that there is a huge
> disparity between the number of people maintaining it and the number
> of people filing bugs in it. It seems to be quite rare for
> communication on bugfixes to take place there, wine-devel is the more
> usual forum.

Which leads to question I think. Shouldn't it be used more by 
developers? Should developers not at least try to mark bugs to some state.

> So are we misleading users by having a bugzilla into thinking that if
> they file a bug there, it'll be fixed when it probably won't?
> 
> If so, does it matter?

Yes it does. People have a program that's not working (correctly) and 
want to submit that somewhere. Or ask for help. If there is nowhere to 
do that (or there is no reply) you'll simply stop users from using Wine. 
They'll not be encouraged to look for other problems.

A problem is that most Wine users are coming directly from Windows and 
are not experienced in writing detailed bug reports. And you'll get the 
"program x is not working, HEEEELPP!!!!1" 'bug'.
That might be the reason developers try to avoid bugzilla. They're tired 
of this kind of reports.

You could also call Wine not ready for Bugzilla. There are so many bugs 
that's not needed for users to report bugs. Developers can find them on 
their own very easy.

> If we were to simply drop bugzilla, how would it impact the project?

Well drop it for a period of time, until Wine is more ready for bug 
reporting. That could be years tough. And I wouldn't like it. It has a 
bad impact on the project.

I would say, try to have some canned responses for bugs to at least give 
users the idea someone looked at their bug. And try to fix/assign all 
bugs that contain usefull information. Some users are able to debug a 
problem to some extend and then submit a bug to hand over the work they 
really don't understand.

Kind regards,
Paul van Schayck