[Asterisk-Dev] bug reporting howto?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

Here is a simple advice: if you want to report an issue with Asterisk
and want bug marshals to actually read your reports, don't attach a
patch to them.

I have reached that sad conclusion from two bug reports:

http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=4637
http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=4734

In both I have reported some easy-to-reproduce bugs. The first one seems
to have been closed this morning due to the fact that the employees of
Digium do not want to read a patch.

Howevr that copyrights issue does not apply to problem descriptions in
the bug reports. I have submitted a trivial patch in hope that it would
help demonstrating the problem. However that issue can still be easily
reproduced and discussed. In fact, I believe anyone familiar enough with
the source of Asterisk could have easily traced the problem even without
that patch.

Current status of that bug is "closed'. I read this as "if we ignore the
problem, it will go away". If you want to use that attitude, please do.
The problem is fixed in the version I distribute, but aparantly not yet
in the trunk. Such an attitude makes me avoiding reporting problems I
have found altogether.


So do I need to submit a disclaimer simply for having a bug marshal look
at my bug reports? Or should have I not mentioned the patch to fix it?
How should I report bugs?

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen     icq#16849755  +972-50-7952406
tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com  http://www.xorcom.com