On Dec 26, 2007, at 8:22 PM, Raymond Chandler wrote:
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?
No its not acceptable when the person posting the bugs on the third party site doesn't provide any or no details on the issue or how to reproduce it. I feel that is 100% unacceptable.
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.
I think the policy should be to use Jira to report bugs. The system was NEVER said to be voluntary regardless of what has been said. Sure you don't have to use it but to make life easy on everyone involved its just common sense to use the tools provided to make thins easier. And don't expect any bugs you find to be fixed till they are posted on Jira. As the project grows this will be very critical.
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?
I think we should publish policy on these issues so there is issues like this in the future.
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.
Well I suspect that any one should treat everyone how they would like to be treated. /b