About distribution bugtrackers, delays and rays of hope
We all know the fancy bugtrackers of the various distributions. I don't have a doubt the idea behind was good and for distribution specific bugs they are great.
But when it comes to concrete application specific bugs, it often happens that users report them to the distribution bugtrackers instead of to the specific software project. At this point, it depends how deep is the relation between the distribution packager of the relevant software package and the upstream authors.
Based on my personal experience, the conversation between down- and upstream is not always as good and intensive as it should be. Unfortunately, this affects both, the users and the upstream project. The users maybe won't get a response to their bug report in time or even no response at all. Upstream authors maybe don't notice about known problems with their software and so can't fix them.
After all, I think distribution bugtrackers for not distro-specific bugs just hinder communication and development in general. Users should contact upstream in case of software bugs in the first place instead using the indirection of distribution bugtrackers.
Let's see an example: in the past in Launchpad (Ubuntu's bugtracker) there were reported some bugs in Geany. As far as I know, most of them were not answered and they definetely were not forwarded to upstream, i.e. me. I/we didn't even know that there were reported and unanswered bugs. But sometimes things actually get better:
Jérôme Guelfucci, as one of the Ubuntu Geany package maintainers, stepped in and took care of the existing bug reports. We met on IRC and then walked through the list of reported bugs at Launchpad. Luckily, most of the reports were invalid just because they were so old that these have been fixed in the meantime. Others had too few information to effectively work on them and so they got marked as Incomplete waiting for feedback from the reporter. So, now after some work which was really overdue, things are better now and Jérôme will try to keep up with the Ubuntu Geany bugs and ping me whenever something interesting happens.
Thanks Jérôme!
Yay. Why couldn't this happen in general? In case of Debian and Geany, things are even better because I personally use Debian and follow Geany bugs reported on bugs.debian.org. But what about all the other distributions?
I'm not sure I want to really know...