[galdosdi]

I apologize if it sounded like a "hard requirement". In fact, I have no affiliation with firefox, so obviously this is no requirement of any kind, soft, hard, or medium, just random advice from a random guy.

The question is "will 'they' actually fix it" which sounds a lot like "what can I do to make it more likely it'll actually be looked at or fixed" and the answer is "idk, but the better the bug report, the better the chances"

[JohnFen]

Ah, I understand better, thank you.

This is a topic of interest to me because the problems related to bug reporting is one of the several things that got me to largely disengage from the formal OSS community (where I used to be very active). Even as a dev who understands what a good bug report looks like, actually making one is often a very unpleasant experience. So I stopped doing that.

[galdosdi]

Yeah, I get your point.

In fairness-- most of the work involved in making a decent report is the same work the fixer would have to do anyway, except it's much easier for the reporter to do it since the fixer cannot read the reporter's mind if reproducing fails due to vague reports.

So, when someone submits a poor report, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the bug wasn't important enough to them to put in the effort. If it's not important enough to even put in the bare minimum effort for the reporter, why should the fixer, who may have to put in an order of magnitude more effort, conclue it's important?

I honestly don't mind the FOSS community being hardasses about accepting bug reports for this reason-- fundamentally, a bug reporter interacting with a maintainer is the same dynamic as a homeless man interacting with a passerby or a nonprofit writing a grant proposal for a foundation-- you are begging for a handout, to get something for nothing.

It's when they're hardasses about accepting bug reports that come with full working PRs that fix the bugs that one is a little more disappointed. At that point I don't necessarily expect arbitrary PRs to be merged of course-- but the fact that a patch is available should be strong evidence that the underlying bug report is more than legit enough to call for looking into, even if fixed some entirely different way.

In my experience, while submitting a bug report doesn't necessarily get it fixed and submitting a PR doesn't necessarily get it merged -- submitting a bug report WITH a PR that fixes it does have a far higher chance of getting the underlying bug report taken seriously (albeit fixed some other way that doesn't use the sample patch submitted)