With the release of Deer Park, we’ve tried to differentiate between different sorts of feedback – specific, detailed bug reports are funnelled towards Bugzilla, and quick feedback and comments go via Hendrix to netscape.public.beta.feedback.
The key point here is that feedback left in Bugzilla requires positive actions to deal with (bugs have to be resolved), whereas feedback left via Hendrix does not. Those entering feedback there are warned not to expect any reply. The idea is that it should be possible for people to skim-read the Hendrix feedback and extract the most useful nuggets of info into bug reports, in a triaging process which is rather the reverse of the normal Bugzilla one.
So this is a request for Bugzilla triagers and other “customer-facing” contributors to also pay attention to the Hendrix feed. Because of the above logic, I hope that your overall workload will be lighter. That’s the point, after all :-)
If you file a bug report or take an action based on a Hendrix feedback report, please post a quick reply in the newsgroup to say what you’ve done, so there’s no duplication of effort.
I still wonder whether all this will be worth the effort. I really hope so, but even with only those bug reports on bugzilla that are well done there aren’t enough people making bug triaging. (Just look at some dataloss bugs in Thunderbird that didn’t get any love since months).
I’m also in need of people. Reporter is just starting to collect data. Having people harvest it in various ways is always welcome ;-)
I guess we’ve answered a critical question about open source software reaching end users: yes, feedback is still important, yes we want to hear from people, we want to improve, just like big software companies do.