[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions

[Ahmad Samir]

On 25 October 2010 02:19, Wayne Sallee <Wayne at waynesallee.com> wrote:
> Michael Scherer wrote on 10/23/2010 08:52 PM:
>>
>> Le dimanche 24 octobre 2010 à 02:09 +0200, Tux99 a écrit :
>>
>>>
>>> Come on... the effort of adding a decent description is minimal for a
>>> packager, the effort for a normal user of making a patch is much
>>> higher, this is not a very friendly answer towards the users...
>>>
>>
>> I think I demonstrated in the past that constant friendliness toward
>> users is not one of my distinctive characteristics.
>>
>> The patch arguent is invalid, because people can also send mail, like
>> "here is a better description of package $FOO because I didn't
>> understood the current one and I wanted to help".
>>
>> So while sending a email and finding the packager email can be hard for
>> some people, I doubt that sending a email is hard for everybody.
>>
>> If writing a decent description is easy and almost effortless, and if
>> sending a email is easy, then what is difficult into doing both ?
>
> I agree that it is only logical to contribute by e-mailing the packager
> about an improvement need in the package, but some packagers don't want you
> e-mailing them about their package.
>
> As a community distro, we want to try to make it comfortable and easy for
> everyone to get involved.
>
> Knowing that many packagers are not going to want you e-mailing them about
> their package, reduces the number of people that will take the time to
> e-mail them with such contribution. Of course what makes it easier for one,
> makes it harder for another, so there needs to be balance there. Sometimes
> our expectations are expecting too much from the other who is working a lot
> of thankless hours to keep the distro going.
>
> It's all about balance and efficiency, and making it easy for people to
> start contributing, and realizing that some jobs are more time consuming
> than we might think.
>
> Developing systems and protocols help keep things running efficient, and
> moving forward.
>
> Wayne Sallee
> Wayne at WayneSallee.com
>

Yes, using bugzilla is usually better; an advantage of filing a bug
report over sending a personal email is that the bug gets more
exposure and any packager who has a bit of free time and can fix it
(especially if you're talking about just changing the package
description) will do so; i.e. the whole process becomes faster by
distributing the workload (especially not-too-invasive package
changes).

-- 
Ahmad Samir