3 ms·
Where am I supposed to look for already-reported bugs? Where do I send that email? Do I need to CC people, and if so who? How am I supposed to format my email?
by crote 3y ago
Where am I supposed to look for already-reported bugs? Where do I send that email? Do I need to CC people, and if so who? How am I supposed to format my email? What information am I required to include? How will I receive updates: will people CC me, or do I have to subscribe to a mailing list - which one of the 291; how do I avoid getting spammed by hundreds of unrelated emails a day? Is my email client even allowed? Am I using a domain which is on some kind of ban list?
Contrast that with the Github or Bugzilla experience: make an account, click "report issue", follow the wizard which asks me to provide all the information I need. I am automatically subscribed, and will receive updates via email.
The whole report-via-email might work for experienced kernel developers, but for a regular user trying to just report a single bug it is way too much of a hassle. If I ever encounter a kernel bug, I would go out of my way to avoid directly reporting it upstream - I'd just file it at my distro and let the maintainer deal with the upstream reporting.
- db48x 3y agoHave you even read the instructions? It answers all of those questions. > I'd just file it at my distro and let the maintainer deal with the upstream reporting. They even ask you to do that _in the instructions_ that you haven’t read due to laziness.
- crote 3y agoThe instructions are fifteen thousands words, and don't even answer all of those questions. That's worse than no instructions at all, if you ask me. You'd be hard-pressed to call me "lazy", to be honest. I'm more than happy to dig into the kernel source to determine the cause of such a regression because I actually like doing that kind of thing. I've submitted several single-digit-line patches to large projects to solve exactly this kind of issue. Spending a Saturday morning trying to figure out a kernel bug is quite enjoyable. Spending a Saturday afternoon trying to figure out how to submit a bug report or patch is not - especially when it is literally a 5-minute process for the vast majority of other software projects. If I have to deal with that much bureaucracy, I'll just keep my patch to myself.