[Pkg-xen-devel] Debian/Xen: dealing with bug reports for upstream

[Hans van Kranenburg]

Hi,

When bugs are reported in Debian against our Xen packages, they might be
able to be solved by changing the way packaging is done, but they also
might point out a problem or shortcoming in the upstream product, or a
feature request for it.

Stephen filed a few of the problem ones recently, like #910961 and
#910948 and #910946.

Facts here are: there's a small team of Debian package maintainers, and
there's a huge amount of different stuff you can do with Xen. So,
there's a fair chance that a problem report does not match with a
been-there-done-that of one of those maintainers.

My impression is that the 'free' Xen product does not really have a
support channel for random problems. Basically, when you use the free
Xen product, and it breaks, you keep the pieces, and you have to help
researching your own problem and come up with a bug report and triage
that is interesting enough to attract attention of a developer who might
be interested to help solving it. That's fine. I don't see that as a
problem.

But, it means that the user has to keep this in mind, and spend more
time on it if needed. I tend to be one of those users, and I in the case
of Xen don't mind spending a bit more time trying to figure out things
and learn new stuff to help getting my own problems fixed.

Still, there are quite a bunch of open bugs in our bts now, which I have
no idea about what to answer on them, because they report a failure in a
scenario that does not match my been-there-done-that. Also, I have to
choose to limiting my effort for help I can provide to only things that
match my own usage scenarios.

To add on top of that... When a user reports a problem in our bts, it's
not visible to upstream developers, unless they browse around here in
their spare time.

This email is about starting the discussion about how we should deal
with this.

A possible option is to wait for a bit and if no other user or
maintainer answers, just be honest and politely tell the user that the
chance of getting it fixed is not very high, unless the user actively
starts working on it himself and jumps onto the xen-users and other
mailing lists themselves?

Curious to hear the opinions of others on this.

Thanks,
Hans