On Wed, May 16, 2007 23:39:15 PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram (sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > M. Fioretti wrote: > >On Wed, May 16, R. Sundaram (sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > > >>You can choose to not contribute anything back and only expect to > >>get everything for free but if everybody chooses to be selfish you > >>wouldn't get what you are getting. This is a ecosystem that relies > >>folks investing resources like their own time or money. If you have > >>the time to complain you have time to contribute. > > > >I have already explained (1) why I believe the "This is a COMMUNITY, > >so you must contribute to it in some way" slogan, even when expressed > >politely and in full good faith as Rahul just did, is... let's say > >counterproductive, these days, so I won't repeat it here. > > Did I ever say you must? Don't put words on my mouth. Well, you did say "if you have time to complain, you have time to contribute", which frankly sounds almost the same to me and has the same limits. This said, the "slogan" above has been repeated in various ways by several people in the other thread, so I was referring to the general attitude. The reason I started this thread from a post of yours is just that yours was the only one (in that moment, at least) which touched both the points I wanted to comment. The "slogan" issue, that is, which may be more productive to drop from now on, and the bugzilla problem. > A key aspect of any distribution is that bugs have been tracked > across several different upstream projects. Bugzilla is finally > getting that straightened out. Hopefully we will see it improved or > replaced. Meanwhile I wrote > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugsAndFeatureRequests I have just looked at that page. Thanks! I think you did a pretty good job of making the current system less unusable (the fact that it is unusable it is not your fault, of course). I have bookmarked that page and will point to it folks who are trying to use bugzilla with Fedora or other environments. However, I am not sure you and I are talking about the same scenario. Your explanations are clear and a real time saver for somebody who already is a competent Linux user. My initial comment was written with the real newbie in mind. Consider what you wrote in the OOo section: * A crash on startup might be a crash in some OpenGL lib, not OOo itself. o Get the test source at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=108799. o Run gcc testgl.c -o testgl -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lGL to compile it. o If it also crashes, your bug is probably not an OOo bug. o If it happens on an x86_64 box, remember that OOo is a 32-bit app, Firefox is 32-bit on the same platforms, so see if it has the same problem as well. These instructions and their purpose are very clear to me, but for a real newbie they are absolutely obscure gibberish. What is a "test source"? What is "gcc"? Where must it "run"? What is an x86_64 box or a "32-bit app"? Please don't be offended, I have said and repeat that this effort of yours is very useful, but we are simply talking of two different user classes here. Saying that "Fedora is a test-bed distro for competent users" is true but doesn't solve the problem from which I started, which is to make easier to all newbies to report bugs in any FOSS. > There are folks who have been trying out other systems too but we > can't just go around implementing what we think is the best. See my initial post: I, too, agree that Fedora shouldn't go by its own on this, also because the solution should be a really standard one. That's why I said that this is something that could happen only with a coordinate effort from the big corporate players in FOSS. Marco -- Help *everybody* to love Free Standards and Free Software: http://digifreedom.net/
