[LEDE-DEV] Why technical elitism is contrary to stated goal of community

[Daniel Dickinson]

On 16-05-06 11:29 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-05-06 at 11:05 -0400, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
>>
>> Technical elitism tends give a 'you're not good enough / you don't think
>> like us, go away' feel to a community.  The 'we won't event look at your
>> bug report if it doesn't meet the special format we came up with that no
>> one else uses' policy is I fear an example of this.  I realize the
>> reason for it is to try and get better quality bug reports, and less
>> ones that aren't useful, but I don't think that is necessarily a good
>> way to about it.
> 
> I'm not sure what the right answer is.
> 
> But where resources are limited, good bug reports make the difference
> between things actually getting fixed, or not. A bad bug report can

Yes, but I think trying to get only good bug reports by making it hard
to do gat a bug report right, is the wrong approach IMO.

Basically, the problem I have is not with the notion of 'only good bug
reports', but with 'the only good bug report one is one our special
format' (that we don't even have link to yet because we haven't figured
it out yet).  In short it would be *far* better to have a bug tracker
that encouraged or require the desired information (or at least made it
pain to omit - bugzilla can do this IIRC), than to introduce a custom
bug reporting format and mechanism that is going to make it harder to
get bug reports at all.

> 
> To *assume* that it's some kind of technical elitism seems a little
> wrong, to me.

As I said, the issue is not with 'only good bug reports', it's with 'we
can ensure only good bug reports by making it a pain to report bugs at all'.

Regards,

Daniel