[mythtv] Why MythTV didn't handle the UK Freeview lineup change

John Barberio barberio at lineone.net
Sun Jul 26 23:09:31 UTC 2009


Allan Stirling wrote:
> Really? Is that what happened? Trac history says something
> different:
>
> 06/03/09 11:13 -
> You add a comment to a fairly unrelated ticket.
> http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/2053
>
> 06/03/09 11:13 -
> You open a new ticket.
> http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/6600
>

Following the instructions you have on your site, I am told to do a  
search for related bugs. I find an no pre-existing bug, but one on  
problems that come up with line-up changes, so in addition to filing a  
new bug, I comment on the line-up changes bug that this is also an  
issue that can come up.

> 06/03/09 12:06 -
> I lock the original ticket. Note - This is not closing it -
> It just prevents the discussion from continuing on that
> ticket. As has been discussed a number of times, discussion
> of known bugs that adds no useful information should happen
> on IRC, mailing lists, etc. 2053 is already a ticket
> assigned to Daniel.
>

You do not, however say that. You say, and again I quote your entire  
comment on the bug when locking/closing, "Trac is not a discussion  
forum." This is not informative, or identifies what the user has done  
wrong. The terseness of your comment and locking the bug, makes it  
appear that the your intent is closing the bug as you consider it  
invalid. This was the impression I left with, that you considered the  
bug invalid, and would not look into it. Being new to the project, I  
wasn't party to any previous discussion you had where you decided  
"things we decide are 'debate' have to be discussed on the mailing  
list or IRC", and this is *not* stated anywhere.

> I then close your new ticket, since it really does contain
> no new information. I mark it as a duplicate of 2053.

Again, if you had more clearly said what and why, this would have  
looked a lot less like you just closing the bug because it was not  
going to be looked at.

If your intent was to close the bug in preference of it being tracked  
in 2053 you really should have said so more clearly. If 2053 was meant  
as an internal only issue ticket, you shouldn't have left it open for  
end-users to append to, and should have allowed creation of a new bug.  
If further clarification of the bug was needed, it should have been  
asked for.

If you need more people to do bug triage, maybe you should consider  
asking for help from the people on the user mailing list who are non- 
coders, but would be able to triage out the user-support issues from  
the bug-fixes for you?

And yes, I do happen to think leaving legitimate bugs open is better  
than closing them because you don't think anyone will ever look at  
them. Having a development round of checking 'do these open bugs still  
apply to the stable release, and if not is there an easier fix now?'  
would be a very good idea from time to time. Trunk development is  
never an excuse not to go back and see what bugs you can close on the  
stable branch. I'd argue that making sure the stable branch is stable  
is more important that accelerating development on trunk.

I think at this point, this has turned into a storm in a tea-cup, and  
my continued presence is probably going to irritate those who see me  
as the sole cause of the problem. So I'll withdraw.

   - John

ps, there was no threat to fork the code. No one is talking about  
forking code.


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