Hi, In the hope of reducing the massive list of open bugs in the Debian kernel, I've been going through (some of) them. Most of that isn't very difficult as quite a lot of them are old and haven't had a (single) reply*, so it mostly consists of asking "Does this problem still exist? If so, can you try it with a recent kernel?" Many of them also miss basic information which I can then ask for. With my logical thinking skills I can also help narrow down what the 'actual' problem is, which should help in finding a solution. But in several cases that's where my contribution needs to stop as it then becomes 'above my skill level' and someone with (far) more knowledge about the kernel needs to take over if a(n actual) solution is to be found. I did write that in one of the bug reports I responded to, but I'm not sure if anyone (who could pick it up from there) saw that. From personal experience I know that when a 'flood' of messages come through, you either stop paying attention entirely or only skim through them with possibly less focus to pick up that one line. Or it was seen, but there hasn't been time yet to follow through on that. To put it in an analogy: I can do 1st line support, but there are (or will be) quite a few cases where it needs to be 'escalated' to 2nd (or 3rd) line. There are/will be cases in which *a* choice needs to be made and I'm not the right person to make that choice. What is a proper way to deal with that? I know that one can tag a bug with the 'help' tag which seems appropriate. There's currently only 1 bug with that tag, so for now it won't 'drown' in an endless list (which the full bug list kind of is imo). I can do that, but if that still doesn't result in a follow up by someone (far) more knowledgeable then I am, then it seems kind of pointless (and also doesn't help with motivation). I have more things/questions in mind (f.e. tooling), but it's already too long, so I'll leave that for another time. Finally, it would be REALLY helpful if more people would help out with this (basic) bug triaging. If someone would pick up 1 bug a month (or even a year), that would be 1 bug less 'I' need to worry about. If more then 1 person would do that, then we can actually work towards a manageable bug list. Cheers, Diederik *) This should not in any way be seen as a critique of the Debian kernel team. It is however a consequence of (consistently) having too few people trying to help out ...
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