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Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

As a user I find the way some of those bug tracking systems are used infuriating. This seems to happen to me often:

  - You submit a bug or find one that's active and comment on it
  - there is no activity
  - then vendor posts needsinfo
  - info posted soon after
  - then ignored for while longer
  - reassigned
  - ignored for while longer
  - then closed because release is obsolete, need retesting in new release

This is mostly in RedHat's bug tracker, but elsewhere also.

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My personal favorites are effective game-breakers for branch-of-users-X, possibly more, which should take minimal effort to fix (unless the architecture is horribly screwed up), that get 100+ submissions as duplicates, reduced test cases, discussions, pasted diffs hoping someone, please God anyone with commit privileges will look... and they get ignored for years.

Looks like in cases like that the bug tracker is making the underlying problems more visible. In that case, removing the bug tracker is not the way forward.

Oh most definitely, it's far better than not having one. I just think that bugtrackers are a bit broken themselves.

Why not help out triaging and fixing bugs then?

At points I've submitted patches or very clear descriptions but they get ignored still. In other projects there is often a steep learning curve to get even a small patch in, like in Mozilla, particularly if it's a language you don't normally use. I think in most projects it's simply not feasible to drop in to do a couple of patches you really have to involved long term.

The only exception to this are security bugs where I've avoided the bug tracker and typically got fast responses and fixes.

OK, join the project and put the patches in yourself.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join

OK, how do I join RedHat Enterprise? which is what we actually use and pay money for therefore where I find the bugs.

I probably should join Mozilla, Ubuntu, KDE and Gnome too - that's going to be a lot of catching up to do just to fix one bug in each.

Can you see what I'm saying? feedback is valuable to those projects but they are ignoring it, if the only way people can get a bug fixed is by spending 10s or 100s of hours getting involved, there is something wrong.

If you contact Red Hat support you'll get immediate help. If you have a support contract you shouldn't be filing bugs in Bugzilla, since the support team will do that for you, and chase the developers to get things fixed. Your support contract will make all this clear.

That's not been my experience, it's like in bugzilla but your oscillating between "waiting on customer" and "waiting on redhat" and the people your talking to don't really understand the problems and so have to ask someone else everytime.

There was an issue in Django's tracker that someone wrote a patch for, and a few of us volunteered to rewrite if given some direction. It's still waiting for a design decision, though.

I've seen this happen too often.

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