[Mageia-discuss] Mageia Forums

[Frank Griffin]

Marc Paré wrote:
>
> I think that I am not different than most other users. The life of
> devs is a mystery to us. We often wonder how you spend your lives etc.
> Maybe one of you could throw together a real-life mystery novel on the
> "Live of a dev". LOL

I'm a dev, although not very much here.  Devs want considered,
structured input, and not several hundred one-line posts from
technically uninformed people giving their personal opinion on technical
issues.

There's an old (and somewhat sexist) joke that has a guy telling his
girlfriend, "if you want a problem solved, tell it to me; if you just
want to vent, tell it to your girlfriends - that's what they're for". 
There's a similar issue here.  Devs don't want to hear about how much
time the bug cost you, or how foolish it made you look in front of your
friends, or how you just won't be able to go on living if it isn't
fixed, or your estimate of how many people are going to move from
[distro-1] to [distro-2] because of this.  A Dev's concern is:

  1) is it really something that should be fixed (in the philosophy or
design of the project) ?
  2) what is its priority relative to other work (this usually doesn't
come from the user) ?
  3) has the reporter done as much as possible to get the bug to the
point where the Dev can work on it as opposed to researching the
situation(s) that reproduce it ?

Bug reports are as close to this as we're going to get.  Not all bug
reports are good ones, granted.  But most of them are of much higher
quality than hit-and-run comments in a forum.  They also have the
advantage of getting quality input from a triage team member or a Dev
early on, which avoids wasting users' time by pinpointing actions that
can narrow the focus of the bug.