Re: my feelings

[Pavel Roskin]

Hi!

Being a maintainer another large project I understand your feelings very
well.  I understand that every responsible maintainer should react on the
reports of the users and use them to improve the project.

Unfortunately, it happens sometimes that users expect you to provide a
free service for them.  They may give you important information, but it
doesn't give them rights to waste your time.

The problem you are describing in not GRUB-specific at all.  When I'm
getting a bugreport about BSDi or AIX I cannot ask the user to send me
that software.  I fix the problem, get another report and so forth.

I think what the best solution would be to draw a line somewhere.  If the
user is willing to help the project and knows how to help, but just lacks
some specific knowledge, it may be worth the trouble to help him.

But if the user needs educating about trivial things (not to write to
maintainers directly, mention version numbers etc), it may be better to
ignore this report and let others educate this guy.

Note that it would not make you a bad or irresponsible maintainer.  Time
of everybody of us is limited, and the responsible thing would be to use
it wisely.

You have more knowledge of the project as a whole, so you could
concentrate on more global ideas, such as adding support for PCMCIA
network cards or XFS.

Many distributions are now using GRUB as the bootloader.  RedHat is
planning to use GRUB is 7.2.  Those companies make money selling support -
they should care about their users' problems.  I'm pretty sure that at
some point they will send you patches, or at least those patches will be
included in the source packages.

Then you will be talking to the experts and you will explain them which
changes are acceptable and which are not.

And don't forget that BIOS is proprietary software.  Don't worry to much
about it - there are already people in charge of it.

I just hope that it helps.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin