James Mohr wrote:
Oranges and apples. I have proof/evidence of his unprofessional behaviour: the comment. There was no evidence or indication of any lack of technical or professional compentence. I manage a hotline, I am writing a book on the subject and I would consider myself an expert in the field. In my professional experience, every hotline manager would say that telling a customer you are annoyed, whether justified or not is unprofessional. Maybe you tolerate comments like that, I don't and would never allow one of my employees to behave that way toward a customer, whether or not they actually paid for support. Saying that I "don't have the know how to explain what the cause is either" is completely baseless. The cause **was** the upgrade, regardless of the reason.
The fstab is a not so unimportant file and it **should** be common knowledge to SuSE that people do, in fact, make changes to it based on their own invididual needs. Making significant changes to an important system file and neither backing up the file or saying that the change was made could have some serious effects on the system. IMHO that's a bug. At the very least it is not something I would expect from a company that is trying to market itself as a business solution.
It was the feedback address that the original "bug" report was sent to and where the IMHO unprofessional comment came from. That is, the place that was annoyed that I didn't pay for the priviledge of reporting a (IMHO) bug.
It's clearly in the interests of SuSE to encourage bug reporting and suggestions for improvements through the feedback channel. At the same time I can see the problem they face: lots of the messages they get are technically misinformed or requests for help from people who are no longer entitled to support. My experience is that many of my messages get no response beyond the automated one -- even a recent message where I not only reported a bug but provided the fix for it. I agree that it's inappropriate for the response person to express annoyance. If he thinks your problem isn't a bug, then he should either just say that in a nonjudgmental way or say nothing at all. Paul