From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:54:11 +0200

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it> wrote:
> On Saturday 21 June 2008 16:31, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
>> I'm leaning towards putting my vote on this suggestion. At least as it
>> works today. I'm thinking perhaps it'll serve its purpose better if only
>> developers can create new entries in that list.

Same here. IMO the main problem is that users fill in (more or less
reasonable) request and tend to completely forget about them while the
tracker is drowning. The situation for bugs isn't totally different
(how often get bugs closed as "out of date" with the comment "no
response from reporter"?) but at least not as worse.

> I think it's very important that users of an application (any application, I'm
> not just talking about Rockbox here) have a reasonably accessible mechanism
> to provide feedback to the developers on how things can be improved.

True, but the developers also need a reasonable way of getting back
into contact with the users making a suggesting. As I said earlier
users tend to forget about their requests ...

> Software developers are very rarely the best judges of what works best for
> non-technical users without any understanding of the internal workings of a
> system, and those people can often come up with some of the best ideas for
> how something should work, or what would be a nice feature, that someone who
> starts thinking from how the system works in detail at present simply doesn't
> have the perspective for.

Ho says that developers in a project like Rockbox even want to make
something working "good" for users? While user input is interesting
and valuable at least I'm doing work for fun (and also to educate
myself ;-) and not to make a "product" (Rockbox is not a product -- I
can't stress this enough). Programming for a product is what I do for
a living.

> I have no idea whether it's possible with the current system, but could
> creating new threads be restricted to developers, whilst allowing anyone to
> add comments to existing threads? Again, I think there's valuable feedback
> from non-developer users which it would be a mistake to lose from the system
> by preventing those people from adding any comments at all.

I agree that if a task comes in users should be able to comment.

>> > I know this is an open source project run by volunteer developers, and
>> > nobody can be told what to do, but I'm just wondering what mechanism is
>> > used to try to get action on confirmed bugs which are in the system?

there is no such system. Having said this there is also no way to
"confirm" bugs. A user submitting a good bug report definitely isn't
anything confirmed, and even if the report is good there is no
guarantee the dev looking at it can reproduce the issue, hence
confirming it. So from my point of view the majority of all bug
reports aren't confimed at all.


 - Dominik
Received on 2008-06-22