[Freeswitch-dev] bug policy

[Raymond Chandler]

    It's recently come to my attention that people are posting bugs in 
various places on the internet (websites, blogs, etc that seem to have 
no official affiliation with FreeSWITCH). That, in and of itself, 
doesn't really strike me as all that bazaar or harmful. I am, however, a 
bit confused by the fact that the bugs reported in some such forums 
aren't in jira. Why would someone who claims to be a "member" of the 
community post a bug to a site not affiliated with FreeSWITCH? Is this 
an accepted/condoned action?

    Should a person that posts to a public site rather than to jira 
expect to receive any support (or inclusion in the project) whatsoever? 
While I don't claim to be a mind-reader and, hence, cannot tell why a 
person would do these types of things. I personally feel that the 
persons responsible for such posts are intentionally trying to defame 
the project. Since that is my interpretation of the ongoing events, I'm 
not posting any links to such resources as that would likely just help 
the author(s) in their goal since i believe googlebot regularly crawls 
the ML archives.

    In many projects, there is policy for almost everything. There's 
policy on where to post bugs and what information to include, where to 
ask for help, even how many spaces and tabs to use when helping write 
code. So, what is the FreeSWITCH policy? Is there a FreeSWITCH policy? 
Is it not thought a good idea to implement such a policy for FreeSWITCH 
(if it doesn't exist as yet)? If there is currently policy regulating 
such things, where can one read about it?

    Since I've "joined" the community, I've tried to help the project in 
any way I can (reporting bugs that I find, submitting what patches I 
can, documenting, etc), so I find it a bit offensive that there are 
people in the community that would do things to hurt the project in any 
way. By "joined", I mean when I decided that this was a worthwhile 
project and decided to help where I can, we all know that there's not an 
actual initiation or anything. I'm pretty sure that the lead devs 
wouldn't be inclined to approve of the afforementioned actions, but what 
I really want to know is how others feel (i.e. am I silly for being 
offended?) and what's expected of a "member" of the community.

--ilm