[Mageia-discuss] Think about bugzilla monitoring?

Ahmad Samir ahmadsamir3891 at gmail.com
Sat Sep 25 06:57:51 CEST 2010


On 24 September 2010 14:58, Juergen Harms <Juergen.Harms at unige.ch> wrote:
> Picking up from where Mageia forked off, many things activities look like
> continuity from Mandriva Linux. But forking is also a challenge to find not
> too hard to implement improvements - such as "bugzilla monitoring".
>
> I think I am not the only one who frequently felt frustrated submitting yet
> another bug, knowing that it had more 50% of chance to disappear the
> "oubliettes". I think there is an objective question: if bugs are not
> followed up, that should not just happen by accident - there should be an
> explicit and justified decision. There is also a subjective question: a user
> who went through the pains to write a good bug report should get a feedback
> with a followup, even if there are no "comments" in the bugzilla data base.
>

Well, let me put it this way, a bug report will go unfixed in the
following cases:
- Triage work ends when the bug report is assigned to the maintainer;
if the bug has no maintainer then the chances that it'll get fixed are
a bit lower (some packages have no maintainer but are used by a lot of
users so it gets fixed any way)

- The package has a maintainer but he's overworked and has a huge
backlog, unfortunately that happens to everyone, in this case posting
a new comment in the report should bring it back up in his list;
pinging a bug report is the reporter's responsibility (triage team is
always understaffed so to speak, too many bug reports, too few people
to triage them all); so if after say a week of reporting a bug you get
no response from the maintainer feel free to ask in the report.

It's always nice to acknowledge a bug report but unfortunately that
doesn't always happen... you have to understand that a lot of bug
reports go in per day (it also seasonal, i.e. towards the end of the
development cycle the amount of bug reports increases considerably).

Another point is, there isn't a bugzilla where some bug reports don't
go forgotten, again ideally this shouldn't happen, but there's ideal
and there's what really happens :/

> Some ideas: have a "lost bug advocate"? create a team - just like the
> "triage team" that feels responsible for bugs not to disappear? (different
> from the, but talking to, maybe overlapping the triage team, leaning on the
> "dev" - in Mageia it will be a volonteer, even more important - to whom a
> bug is assigned) - proposing and justifying which bugs - for the time being
> - will have no follow up), creating some commented statistics on the fate of
> bugs - good for QA, but also for PR about Mageia? trigger an alarm if too
> many bugs remain un-resolved? - always assuming that enough active
> contribution can be recruited from the temp. wiki list. I also believe that,
> for Mageia, the situation is different. In Mandriva, I guess that some
> (many?) of these acitivities were done by staff of the QA group - in Mageia
> an alternative is needed.
>
> Maybe Mandriva had something like this - if yes, it was too well hidden.

As I said, pining a bug report to bring to the attention of the
package maintainer is the reporter's responsibility, at least given
the fact that he's suffering from that bug, i.e. he has a strong
motive.

You also have to bear in mind that sometimes a bug reporter doesn't
remember, or doesn't bother, to close a report when a bug he'd
reported has been fixed.

Also note that before a new release a lot of devs/packagers go through
all the reports assigned to them (depending on their time of course if
they're contributors doing dev work in their free time, or employees
with other more critical things to fix before a release).

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-- 
Ahmad Samir


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