[mythtv] Ticket locking and a PulseAudio fix

[Michael T. Dean]

On 05/09/2011 08:36 AM, James Le Cuirot wrote:
> I wish to express my concern at how tickets are sometimes being handled
> by the developers, in particular with regard to how PulseAudio users
> are being treated as second-class citizens. Now I know that some of you
> have strong opinions about PulseAudio and you are obviously entitled to
> those opinions. You are even entitled to refuse your time to work on
> PulseAudio issues yourselves but please do not lock such tickets
> without good reason. This prevents users from talking about these
> issues or even providing possible fixes without posting to this list as
> I am doing today.

The ticket was locked /because/ the ticket is not the place for 
discussion.  All discussion belongs on the mailing list, and bug reports 
and information relevant to fixing the bug should be the only 
information in the bug database.

When people start discussions on the ticket, it causes an explosion of 
comments in Trac.  Since there's no way to sort the comments by "value", 
the only way for developers to find the important information is to read 
every single comment when they begin working on the ticket or when they 
have some code that may fix the issue.  Not trying to speak for other 
developers, but if fixing a bug requires me to do a couple hours of 
reading through 100+ comments in a ticket, I can guarantee I won't be 
fixing bugs--I'll be spending what free time I have available for MythTV 
work reading tickets (and the inability to actually make progress will 
lead to my setting aside less time to work on MythTV, so ...)

If the comments on the ticket are left to get out of hand, the developer 
will never find the pertinent information buried among the "me too" 
comments or the comments from users who didn't understand the problem 
and reported additional, unrelated information (perhaps regarding issues 
with similar symptoms or where the last logging was similar or 
whatever).  Therefore, at a certain point, the developer is almost 
guaranteed to ignore all the comments--including those that provided 
critical/relevant information.  Then, the ticket will be closed with a 
fix that seems reasonable to the dev, but if it fails to take into 
account certain information that was buried in the comments, the person 
who brought up that important information will need to create a new 
ticket once the original is closed to get the "rest" handled properly.  
So, locking the ticket isn't a punishment for those who have something 
important/useful to say--it's instead a way of making sure they're heard.

Therefore, /all/ discussion should occur on the list (here), then, if 
some information is deemed important enough, or if a patch or something 
else the developer will need when fixing the issue comes about from that 
discussion, it should be put on the ticket (or a link to the important 
post on the list should be put on the ticket).

> The issue at hand is http://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/9579. Pausing
> playback currently causes one CPU core to use up 100%. jyavenard simply
> locked the ticket stating that using ALSA:pulse works for him.

Pretty sure that was an "in the meantime, while I figure out what I'm 
going to do" suggestion.

That said, here /is/ the right place for a discussion.  So, if you 
really want to discuss the issue in #9579, please create a new thread 
here on the list with the ticket number in the subject (i.e. "Ticket #9579
100% CPU on one core when paused"--generally replying to the ticket 
e-mail from the -commits list works perfectly) to make it easy to 
find/relate back to the ticket.

Thanks,
Mike