Is there a formal process for reviewing an arguably incompetent bugzilla staffer? Obviously it wouldn't be to submit their name as a bug. But is there any defined administrative layer that concerns itself with people on that level who are dragging on the project?
I looked around a bit for information on this. Sorry if it's posted somewhere and I missed it.
Thanks, Whit
To spare everyone time and to skip directly to an entertainment see bug 9147: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9147
I agree with Whit. Most of your writing in that bug report would be in line with lack of sleep or prolonged fatigue, or some other factor that causes you to be compartmentalized in your own verions of things and completely ignore the real issue at hand.
Similar behavioral pattern that happened on China Airlines Flight 006. The resemblance is striking: the pilots completely unaware of what the real problem is, and were dealing with non-issues (rather than fluing the plane). Similar thing here: the user tells you one thing (the real issue), your situational awareness is as if something entirely different has been taking place (dupes, etc). Interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/ComAndRep/Ch inaAir/AAR8603.html
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.79.html
[...] the captain had become so preoccupied with the dwindling airspeed that he failed to note that the autopilot, which relied on ailerons only, not the rudder, to maintain heading, was using the maximum left control- wheel deflection available to it to overcome the thrust asymmetry due to the hung outboard engine. When the right wing nevertheless began to drop, ... the captain didn't notice the bank on the attitude indicator ... . When he did notice it, he refused to believe what he saw. At this point, ... the upset had begun and the captain and first officer were both spatially disorientated.
You can almost substitute terms from the bugreport for the flying terms above...
Common thing to happen when you're tired, distracted, etc. So this is nothing personal, just noticing a pretty common problem. BTDT, one has to learn to recognize the first signs and take a break (helps me). At least here it won't kill anyone. Now, if you *are* sleeping well (and long enough), and are not tired, then IANAD and wouldn't know what to do either...
I've spent a fair amount of time helping users on irc in #winehq and this bug report sounds like one of the most common issues, user error precipitated by a distribution that requires a high level of user knowledge. The back and forth on the bug is mostly a waste of time trying to figure out user compile time options, which version of wine is actually running when multiple versions are installed etc. I can understand Vitaliy's frustration with this stuff as its easily avoidable on almost all binary package based distributions.
Maybe we should point gentoo users at the gentoo wiki page we have and enhance that page with things we've learned from gentoo debugging.
As a Gentoo user, I would have to agree. If a fairly good document is put together a lot of headaches can be avoided. When they are done following the guide then bugzilla staff and others can help them. The advantages of this are twofold. One is that there are fewer headaches from chasing down weird compile time options, etc. The second is that Gentoo is a more advance/complicated distro and some of the users really know their stuff and can be quite useful. By providing good documentation we might encourage those users to participate more. Weed out the bad, keep the good.
Umm, how exactly does Gentoo affect the "legacy" compilation of an autotools-based tarball, where you simply untar, configure and make install which normally will go to /usr/local/...? I'd expect this to work the same on my FC6 system, just like it used to work on a FreeBSD system last time I checked (a few months ago).
If wine is not overzealous by design in finding its bits and pieces (I doubt, since I don't recall seeing such a bug) and gets correctly invoked, AFAIK it will ignore any existing installations and do its thing.
I'd routinely have version A of wine installed from an rpm, and one or more local versions installed in $HOME for testing before deployment. Somehow it had just worked. Heck, every once in a while when I need two or more versions of wine deployed at the same time from an rpm, that'll work just fine too (a development tool or two used to require an older wine version to work).
As a more useful measure, I'd suggest bug reporters who run into possible compilation issues to post their ~/.bash_history with the set of lines starting at untarring the package up to running the test. Should enable easy finger-pointing and take minimum time. In such a case, VM could have said "see line 45 of your history, you've done foo which will not work due to xyz, ask on #wine-users for a correct way of doing it". If there's a better way of providing "steps to reproduce the problem" with a bug report (in this case), I'm all ears.
Cheers, Kuba