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[Brian J. Tarricone]

BluPhoenyx wrote:

>On Saturday 04 December 2004 17:30, j.markoll at free.fr wrote:
>  
>
>>Hello you all,
>>I hardly understand what is the conclusion. I'm a true newbie, under Debian
>>Sarge, with Xfce4 and waiting to see that everybody is fully satisfied with
>>the young and very interesting 4.2 version, as I'm much too newbie to
>>manage successfully with systems not yet totally fixed.
>>I'm not a native of english language either, so it's not so easy, and still
>>I'm interested with the list where I can read about, to improve about
>>understunding more about Xfce.
>>
>>So, I would just like to ask that you mail clearly about that, incase the
>>deciders of the list close it, as there is also a forum (but I am listed
>>already on several, and that's much forums)
>>    
>>
>
>Sorry, I did not mean to give the impression that the list WOULD close. I 
>don't have any authority for such an action. I was simply trying to 
>understand the purpose of having a list when the user could not discuss Xfce 
>bugs or issues.
>
>FWIW, I don't have a problem with the list itself, just the idea that 
>everything is a bug to be reported to the bug tracker without discussion by 
>the users.
>
the point is that there's no need to *discuss* bugs, only to report them 
and provide information about them.  if there's something that you think 
is probably a bug, go ahead and file a bug for it.  if you're wrong, 
it'll get closed; no harm done.  if there's something that seems odd to 
you but that might be user error, ask about it here.  if there's 
something you can't do that you'd like to be able to do, ask about it to 
see if it's something you've missed, or if the feature isn't available, 
or if there's a workaround that maybe someone else has found.

the situation that i hate is when discussion about an obvious bug goes 
on for a while on the ML, and then either
1) a bug report never gets filed, and the bug gets forgotten, or
2) a bug report gets filed, but has incomplete information, requiring 
some work digging through mailing list posts to extract the required info.
both of these things have happened in the past, and it would be nice to 
avoid it if possible.

i guess to put it another way...  if you really want to discuss bugs on 
this ML, feel free, but don't expect them to get fixed that way.  the 
only way i can give any kind of guarantee that the bug will be tracked 
down and fixed is if it's in bugzilla.

just for the record, xfce4-dev isn't a bug reporting forum either.  it's 
a place to discuss the ways and merits of implementing features and 
fixing things, as well as coordinating development efforts, not a place 
to gather information about bugs.  nor is it a place to ask why 
random-software won't compile, or why xfce doesn't have feature XYZ.

    -brian