Package Maintainer Responsiblities vs. unmonitored Bugzilla components for GNOME packages

[catanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

With Forgejo, we should be able to replace the auto-responder with an issue report template, so you see our message before filing your bug report, rather than after. I’ve found this to be a highly effective strategy in the Epiphany issue tracker on GitLab. Before I could set issue report templates, I used to routinely close probably half of the issue reports by redirecting users to WebKit Bugzilla. Nowadays, I only occasionally have to close an issue report as a WebKit issue, because most users see the issue report template and immediately redirect themselves.

@ngompa

A great number of upstreams would be very angry if users were sent to them to report bugs for packages as a default. And in general, the job of a Fedora package maintainer is to identify, curate, and work with upstream. That can also mean forwarding bugs on your own, or requesting the submitter to do so.

GNOME won’t be angry so long as we are reporting bugs for recent software versions and not ancient software versions. This is a mainly a problem for longer-supported distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or RHEL. Fedora’s short release cycle inherently fixes this for us.

In practice, most bugs are upstream bugs, not packaging issues. Yes, there are many exceptions, but in general, asking users to start upstream is going to be much more successful than starting downstream and getting nothing. Users who report GNOME bugs to upstream have a decent chance of the bug being fixed. Users who report GNOME bugs to Fedora have little to no chance of that. I strongly suspect this holds for most of our packages, not just GNOME. Now, we do have many exceptions where the downstream packager diligently responds to issue reports! But surely this is an exception, not the rule. So I suggest we focus on fixing our bug tracker and bug report tooling to report bugs in the correct place.

But yes, when somebody actually does want to report a packaging issue, that just gets lost currently. You have to manually contact a developer to have any chance. I agree that this is a problem.

I really don’t think it’s realistic to expect packagers to read the downstream bug reports. Which is why reopening the issues won’t work: nobody is watching. All other downstream issue trackers have the same problem; you’ll find that Debian’s issue tracker is probably just as bad as ours, and Ubuntu’s is surely much worse.