Re: Too few people taking care of bug reports, was: Re: Release process (was Re: Move to a cadence release model?)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-tangents@gnu.org, john@yates-sheets.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 22:39:25 +0200
> 
> On 11/11/2015 05:43 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >>> These considerations will become valid only when we have enough
> >>> developers paying attention to bugs that are reported.  (That includes
> >>> you, Stephen, btw.)
> >
> > (Upon re-reading, I apologize for being so blunt.  It just feels too
> > lonely there, at times.)
> 
> I think a significant part of that problem is self-imposed.

Not sure I understand what you mean by that.  Self-imposed by me?

> Personally, I try to pay attention to bugs that are related to code that 
> I at least have touched at some point, or bugs that affect me directly, 
> but it seems there aren't too many of those. And I don't think it's 
> reasonable to expect much more of any contributor.

I disagree.  IME, frequently just looking or stepping through
unfamiliar code can reveal bugs whose reasons we can easily understand
and fix.  Just a few minutes ago I had this experience once more, see
bug#21881.  I assure you I knew nothing at all about mm-url.el, and
still don't.  Still, it took me just a few minutes to understand why
EWW barfs and see the solution that I'm sure is right.

You should try this some time.  I think everybody here should.

Worst that could happen is that you will only be able to add some
non-trivial information to the bug report, based on what you saw,
without actually finding a solution.  But even that alone could allow
someone else to suggest a solution.  That, too, have happened to me.

Bottom line is: people like you and me (and many others here) know
quite a lot about Emacs and about debugging, and can find solutions to
many bugs even in unfamiliar code.

> Our bug tracker is peculiar, and on its own turns many less experienced 
> users away. Users that could participate in triaging bugs, at least, if 
> not writing patches. Maybe trying out submitted patches, too.

Yes, triage would help as well.

As for the bug tracker, I don't see how it could have such a
detrimental effect on potential contributors.  It's just a mailing
list, not unlike this one.  In addition, we have an Emacs package that
interacts with the tracker, so one could work with bugs without ever
looking at either the Web forms or the email messages.

I'm not saying there's no place for improvements, but I cannot imagine
that the reason for such a small number of people who work on bugs is
the bug tracker.  I think it's more likely the fear of diving into
unfamiliar code.