On Wednesday 30 October 2002 02.49, KMcLauchlan wrote:
From my perspective, it's far better that I don't clog the system with amateurish/naive attempts.
This point I strongly disagree with. I've upgraded two of my three machines now to 8.1, and so far the only problem I've seen is in the upgrade of cyrus-imap (a real PITA, I can tell you, but I managed to get it to work in the end :), but that's not the point. It is very far from the point. If linux is ever going to make it to the home user's desktop it needs to be usable even to the people who don't know what you're doing (and no Kevin, I'm not saying you're one of them). So even clueless bug reports should be welcomed, in fact encouraged, because it should not be possible for a user *who isn't running as root* to mess up his system. Mess up his user config, sure, but not his system. Having said that, I can understand why places like developer's mailing lists and other are so careful about what gets posted as bugs. There needs to be some sort of middle ground, a place where even newbies can "clog the system with amateurish/naive attempts" and get a useful answer. If it then turns out to be a valid bug, it could be forwarded to the relevant places. On lists like SLE I think a lot gets answered. But there are reasons why not everything can get an answer. It's virtually impossible, for instance, to understand why another person's system is crashing, when your own system doesn't crash even if you do exactly what the other person *says* he does. Some things just can't be fixed 'remotely'. Anders