Re: [Qemu-devel] Norton Ghost crashes with page fault for me too.

[Henrik Nordstrom]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 address@hidden wrote:

> But it gets more than a little darn frustrating when you are enthused about
> the project, you try to help the devlopers and project by deliberately doing
> the testing to find bugs and problems, you report the bugs and problems.....
> And nothing happens.
>
> Not an acknowledgement.  Not a fix.  Nothing.
>
> Not that week.  Not that month.  Not the next month.  Basically, the effort
> you deliberately put into finding bugs and reporting the bugs has
> disappeared.

This I buy. But I am not that convinced a bug reporting tool automatically 
helps the situation.

A (open) bug reporting tool is only meaningful if there is developer 
resources to keep active track of the open bugs. If there isn't developer 
resources to actively monitor and work with the bug reporting tool the 
bugs just accumulate to the point that the reports looses their value. 
This can be seen in quite many of the projects on savanna where the number 
of bug reports is huge, and noone actively manages them so you don't 
really know if a bug still exists or if it will get acted upon.. but it is 
true that the reports doesn't get lost and sometimes it actually results 
in the bug being fixed years later provided the bug report has the 
relevant information to identify the problem.

But from experience being the Squid HTTP Proxy release maintainer on an 
estimate about 20-30% of my time is spent on monitoring bug reports which 
doesn't really get anywhere (usually the reporter never comes back with 
requested additional information, or the problem is an old problen fixed 
in the current version). Another 20% is spent on invalid bug reports 
(configuration errors, bad builds, incorrect patching, not Squid being the 
cause to the problems etc). Levaing about 50% of my available time for 
real bug reports and development. While we do have (and use) a bug 
tracking tool most of the important bugs is discovered either from 
mailinglist discussions or internal testing. The perhaps most important 
benefit we have from the bug reporting tools is as a scratchpad for 
preleminary versions of the patches and to track forward porting of 
patches from the stable version to the development version.

Regards
Henrik