On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> from a resource point of view ... if we sum up the time spent on
> handling duplicates, the total will be considerably smaller if the
> maintainers take care of doing it, not the submitters. still we dare to

Maintainers rarely handle the duplicate bug reports, people who read
kde-bugs-dist do. (There are certainly some exceptions, with apps that
have very engaged developers, but a large chunk of reports goes to
konqueror anyway, which has a rather overloaded maintenance team).

> value our own time higher then the time of the users for pragmatic
> reasons - but even that does not hold if another kde developer reports
> a bug. ergo, kde developers are allowed to file duplicates. :)

What you're missing here is that checking for a duplicate increases work
for only the reporter. A duplicate getting filed increases the workload
for the dozen or so people who spend a considerable amount of timing
sifting through incoming bug reports.