[shmerl]

Except it is broke. I'm not motivated to deal with Trac even if I want to submit a bug report.

So the above argument is not addressing the situation. Making bug reporting a better experience is in the interest of the project.

I find Debian bug reports a similarly annoying experience becasue it's so archaic. I.e. I deal with it, but I can totally understand if someone is turned off by the experience and simply avoids reporting bugs because of it.

[dmw_ng]

Making code contribution a better experience is in the interests of the project, making it easier to report bugs is not such a clear win. Consumption-centric interactions are a modern concept originally popularized by the structure of the GitHub UI. Gamifying project popularity and making it easy for users to report bugs nobody is paying to have fixed has almost nothing to do with the actual task of developing software, although (cough) both are convenient if your primary use of open source is as a marketing tool.

I'm sure Marshall McLuhan would have a few things to say about GitHub if he were alive today.

[shmerl]

Elitist approach to bug reporting is wrong, at least that's my opinion. Unless project maintainers indeed don't care about bug reports and just do whatever. But then it's more arrogance than actual benefit to the user.

I think more projects suffer from under reporting of bugs than from too many bugs reported.

And if no one is fixing bugs, then the above doesn't matter anyway.

[camgunz]

You're being really ungenerous here, saying their bug tracking system is "broken", their use of it is "elitist", they "don't care about bug reports" and they're guilty of "arrogance". I don't think you can substantiate any of this just from the fact that they use Trac.

You (well, maybe not you, but one) can also imagine all kinds of counter-arguments (not that I know if any of these are true or not):

- Devs would rather spend their time on development

- No one is inspired to move the system over

- They have automations or conventions built on Trac

- Their super users (prolific users, testers, and engineers) are all used to Trac

- People use RSS feeds (Trac has lots of RSS feeds) to stay informed or build other tools, which would all have to be migrated and might have incompatible formats

I encourage you to be more open-minded about the way others choose to work. We shouldn't overemphasize homogeneity in work processes. I also encourage you to be more generous with the words you choose.

[shmerl]

To clarify, I'm not saying it's arrogance in this particular case, but answering the above comment which claims there is no need for better bug reporting experience. That kind of attitude is arrogance I think.

All projects can have practical limitations and migrating the bug tracker is still work of course. But ignoring or even denying the fact that current experience is far from perfect is wrong.

[mataug]

Given the limited resource at the disposal of an open source project team, they need to pick their battles carefully to produce the most value with the least resources.

For a mature project such as FFmpeg, migrating to a new bug tracking system may produce some value to a small set of people who are reporting bugs, but for the vast majority of FFmpeg users, it produces no value.

So in this particular case it seems like they are willing to sacrifice the convenience of a small subset of users in the interest of the whole user community.

This applies to many mature and long running projects.

[shmerl]

They can choose whatever priorities of course, but I'd disagree that it's not impacting anyone besides a small portion of the users. Discouraging bug reports reduces quality for everyone.

Those who report bugs might be a smaller portion, but projects need them I'd argue way more than those who use and never report anything to them.

[dmw_ng]

I'd encourage browsing their Trac for context.. the handful of regular contributors definitely don't need any extra bug reporters

[shmerl]

This kind of argument is exactly what I described above as an arrogant attitude. Not sure if developers actually use that in this case, but if some projects do - it's not a good thing at all.