Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Public service announcement: Read the original bug reporter's summary before adding unrelated comments

I find that I'm wasting considerable time trawling through bug reports where comments not from the original reporter indicate experiences involving very different software configurations. For instance, person A files a bug against pulseaudio on default Ubuntu, and you see very similar symptoms on default Kubuntu and thus proceed to add some comments to the bug report.

File a separate bug.

The bug reporter's symptoms don't involve Phonon at all, but yours do. You've just splattered over an otherwise useful timeline, which generally makes me want to take a long springtime walk instead of fixing the actual bug. Thanks for understanding.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Public service announcement: When in doubt, don't splatter your apport info into an existing ALSA bug report

Folks -

Please, please don't apport-collect -p alsa-base foo (or apport-collect foo in 10.04 LTS) into a bug report that you didn't file unless a member of the audio dev team explicitly requests it. What we end up with are reports that start from the original reporter as "my laptop's internal mic doesn't work" and end with dozens of unrelated comments from other people along the lines of "my laptop's internal speakers are too loud".

Here's the gist: your symptoms may be eerily similar, but your audio hardware often is quite different, which means that resolving the original reporter's bug symptoms should only affect that reporter's hardware. Of course, if you have identical hardware, then your symptoms will be resolved in your own bug report, too. If you didn't file the original bug report, please just file a new one. Thanks for understanding.