do you care about bug reports?

[Graham Percival]

In the past few months, a few bug reports have gotten lost.  A few
emails to the bug-lilypond list were never added to the bug
tracker, so even if a developer wanted to work on it, he wouldn't
know about the bug.

Honestly, I don't care.  We have over 300 bugs, up from 60 or so a
few years ago.  We already have more bugs than programmer-hours.
Ok, losing bug reports isn't ideal... but I'm not willing to take
action to fix it, so I can't claim to actually *care* about this
problem.

Does anybody in the user community care about it?


Helping with bug reports is one of the easiest, if not *the*
easiest, job in lilypond development.  When you see an email, you
check:
1) is it a minimal report?  If not, ask the user to trim it down.
2) can you reproduce it?  If not, ask what version/OS the user has.

If both checks pass, then:
3) add it to the issue tracker.  This is an easy-to-use web
interface.
   NB: add tags to the issue according to the guidelines given by
   the developers.  This means that almost no bug has High
   priority.  It doesn't matter if you or the user think it's an
   important bug.

That's it!  Once you're used to the work-flow, takes about 15
minutes a week.  Maybe 20 if you include closing bugs as well once
a new version is released, but I never considered that part *work*
when I was doing this job... verifying that bugs are fixed, and
possibly even sending messages to the original reporters, was
immensely satisfying!

We can have 2 or 3... or even 5 or 6... Bug Meisters.  Actually,
it would be a great idea to have multiple people, in case somebody
goes on holiday or whatever.

Cheers,
- Graham