Hi emorrp1,
emorrp1 wrote:
Well, the only bugs that were reported on 14th Dec do not match your description - #496730 was fixed by Clem the following day and #496353 was a dupe that was commented on and bypassed the very same day. Please provide a link.
One reason I didn't provide a link is because I was concerned that the particular launchpad I reported the bug in was not being checked. The fact you were unable to locate the bug report in question underlines that fact. In fact this was my main initial reason for replying to this thread, that there are too many places to report bugs, and because of this, people do not know where to report the bug so that it gets seen.
There are multiple launchpads for linux mint - one for the distro, which I'm assuming is the one you're checking, then one for mintupdate, one for mintmenu, one for mintupload... I picked the most appropriate one for my bug - mintmenu. In my opinion, these extra launchpads need closing down.
emorrp1 wrote:
Firstly I agree, you should probably know that your chances of getting a new bug report even noticed in Ubuntu is slim (just see the Mint ones I've acknowledged and sent upstream). My main aim when I volunteered to be bug supervisor was to have some sort of response as quickly as possible, to prevent the frustration of uncertainty you're feeling. This worked well over the summer when I could spend time chasing down a bug, but wasn't so effective once I started back at Uni and became even worse with the explosion of bug reports for Helena, I can't keep up.
*sigh* I haven't had to report a bug upstream in a long time, so that is something I wasn't aware of. I would point out that it's not just the frustration and uncertainty that reporting a bug and getting no feedback, but that if you look at any opensource project, there is always the possibility of finding a dead project, and one of the ways people check (at least myself and other people I know) is to look at the open bugs for the project. If you look at mintmenu's launchpad it would be easy to conclude that it is an unmaintained project. Not so much with the main linuxmint launchpad I presume, which is good.
emorrp1 wrote:
Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer than that on average. Mainly because there are very few "well-formulated" bug reports (just scroll through the list on launchpad) and they often involve random hardware or software that I don't have, but also because there's always a lot of background reading to be done. Not to let this dis-hearten me, I set up numerous virtual machines - one for each edition and version of Mint and the corresponding upstream Ubuntu release. I also formulated a number of standard responses and often marked a bug as "Incomplete" rather than "invalid" or "won't fix" to give the bug reporter a chance to respond.
A good example is bug #499475 (
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/499475), which I mistook for your bug before noticing the exact date and so went through with it, total time: >30mins First I had to realise the reporter meant "tab" rather than "tag", I then checked *my* Mouse prefs (Gloria) had the touchpad tab. Next I loaded up my Helena VM - sure enough there was no Touchpad tab. However I realised it could be a fancy app that only shows that tab if a touchpad is detected, so I loaded up my Gloria VM, to show yep, no Touchpad tab (whereas I know it's capable of it since it works on my native Gloria system). I then searched launchpad for similar issues: Possibility number 1 - touchpad not correctly detected [hardware]. I could have stopped there (mark "incomplete") and just asked them to run through a number of touchpad troubleshooting routines and probably never heard from the reporter again (approx time taken 10-15mins).
At this point I was going to try installing Helena in my native test partition, but discovered my optical drive isn't working - I'm not counting this 10mins. I was working on the assumption that this was your bug report (ignoring your "well-formulated" comment anyway) so I assumed (for the time being) that Mint was correctly identifying the touchpad. I therefore turned to the fount of all knowledge:
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=karmic+touchpad+preferences and discovered an upstream change for Karmic that meant you couldn't disable the touchpad fully. This was also echoed in bug #404638 and the other google links, so I loaded up my VMs again to find where this option would be (general/accessibility), but obviously it's still not showing unless a touchpad is detected: Possibility number 2 - upstream changes. At this point (just under 15mins) I gave up and edited the bug report with my findings, was generous in leaving it "Incomplete" rather than "Won't Fix" dues the ambiguity of the exact upstream changes, but writing up the bug report usually takes about 5mins to collate all the info.
Total time investigating this one bug: >30mins
Indeed, for a distro bug, I can well imagine that the time taken is exponentially greater, and especially when the problem has not been introduced by the mintify process. This is one of the problems of running a distribution and one of the many reasons I have never done so (aside from the fact that mint is such a good distro).
emorrp1 wrote:
Again I agree, I have in fact said as such to the Mint Team. The problem is really one of manpower, there's only so much any one of us can do with outside commitments - If you're willing to volunteer for the job, I'll recommend you and give you all the help I can in starting out. Incidentally, I elected to stop receiving e-mails from launchpad almost immediately upon become the bug supervisor because there're so many and whenever I do have time, I just logon to launchpad and see what's new. Also, just a reminder that Ubuntu bug reports often remain untouched for months, sometimes years.
I think that my earlier comment stands on this - it's not just a question of manpower, but centralisation. If the volume was low enough to receive the emails from launchpad, having multiple launchpads (perhaps plus the forum, but not IMHO the community site as well) would work. I am well aware of how much time volunteering for a project such as this takes, I used to be a package maintainer for cAos Linux and am not in a position to offer any more of my time at present, except in occasional hopefully constructive input such as this.
emorrp1 wrote:
I don't mean to be harsh towards your comments or anything, but I do want to emphasise that I still care about the Mint project, I just can't donate as much time during term.
My comments are only intended constructively, the bug only frustrates me occasionally, and I do appreciate the effort put in by the team, including yourself. I am trying to help in the small way I can by bringing this discussion to the team, and hopefully it is not seen as an attack, but indeed constructive.
emorrp1 wrote:
Total time taken to respond to your comments about bug supervising (inc. marking a couple of bugs duplicate, the touchpad bug [and finding it - no date filter on lp], discovering my optical drive doesn't work, writing this post [about an hour] etc.): 2hrs
Watching Husse's never-ending efforts to improve the organisation and effectiveness of the Team: priceless
Thanks for your time on this, but I would be tempted to separate those two things out - the point of my post is not to get my bug looked at, but to get the bug-reporting structure of Linux Mint looked at, which would hopefully have the knock-on effect of the bug in question looked at.
Thanks again for your input on this and hopefully something will come of the discussions.
--
Martyn