[cairo] How can we make our bugzilla situation stink less?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 12:31 -0500, Carl Worth wrote:
> I'll be honest. I've never liked bugzilla. I think it's a bad
> interface on top of the wrong model in many ways.
> 
> I originally setup a bugzilla instance for cairo bugs because some
> people just plain expect to be able to report bugs that way, and
> because, (unlike the mailing list), it gives reporters a URL which
> they can poll to check for status on a topic.
> 
> But bugzilla is still full of fatal flaws. Perhaps the worst is its
> notion of a "default owner" and the pair-wise nature of the
> communication it setups. Pair-wise communication isn't how we work in
> the cairo community, (or anywhere in free software development), and
> it isn't going to scale to let us get our work done.

Actually a default owner is not that much of a bad idea IMO.  It's just
that they are mostly outdated.  Owen is listed as the default owner of a
lot of components for example.


> For, example, a bug was just posted today:
> 
> 	AX_C_FLOAT_WORDS_BIGENDIAN doesn't work because grep doesn't
> 	work with binary file
> 
> 	https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9124
> 
> This is a bug related to some code that Daniel Amelang wrote. Daniel's
> going to have some interest in keeping this code bug-free since he has
> invested personal effort in it, and it's got his name attached to
> it. He also has experience in testing the code of interest.
> 
> But there's no way we could ever set things up so that Daniel would be
> the "default owner" of a component that any user would select
> correctly. We could never have a sufficient list of components, and we
> could never maintain that list, and even if we could, users could
> never deal with the problem of selecting the correct one from such a
> large list, (nor would they even be likely to have the necessary
> information to make the selection).
> 
> So, that bug report gets mailed to me, since I'm the default owner of
> basically everything, and I think "Oh, Daniel should fix that up right
> quickly". But he can't unless he knows about it, and then I have to go
> tell him about it, (as in this email here), and we've lost a lot of
> time.

What you can do is CC them with a one line note.  Works good enough as
soon as they have a bugzilla account.  So, the pattern is: there are
people that monitor all bugs, and others that don't.  For those who
don't, you've got to CC them if you want to assign the bug to them.  You
can use the AssignedTo field, but it's not necessary.


> Meanwhile, when Daniel does come back with a fix, he's going to need
> to get it into the tree, and if that means he has to ask for someone
> else to apply a patch, then we're right back where we started, (the
> bugzilla entry above comes with a patch).
> 
> Anyway, we do have some things in place to make this better. First, is
> that we have a cairo-bugs mailing list that gets all bugzilla-
> generated mail sent to it. Everyone that is "responsible" for code in
> cairo should be subscribed to that list. The instructions for
> subscribing are here:
> 
> 	http://cairographics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cairo-bugs
> 
> The instructions are a bit goofy since we use a bugzilla watch list
> to avoid duplicate mails---but this also means I can't generate a list
> of who is "subscribed", (as far as I know), which also stinks.

One way to improve it is to make cairo list a subscriber to cairo-bugs:
send all bug activity to mailing list.  Given the volume of bug mail I
get from cairo, I don't think it's as bad an idea as it first sounds.

> Meanwhile, people like Daniel and Joonas that are churning out great
> code as fast as they are shouldn't be asking other people to apply
> patches for them. They should just be pushing good stuff out to the
> tree, (after being disciplined enough to run things through "make
> test" and cairo-perf-diff to ensure there are no correctness or
> performance regressions). So, Daniel and Joonas, please follow these
> instructions so I can create an account for you which will let you
> push directly:
> 
> 	http://freedesktop.org/wiki/AccountRequests
> 
> So let's use those things as well as we can. And if anybody has other
> ideas for helping us make more efficient use of bugzilla reports, I
> would be glad to hear them.

So, given that the account request needs people to open a bug, this
makes sure that they have a bugzilla account.  Rest is to find/remember
their email address, but that will be cached in your browser the first
time you add them to CC.

> -Carl

My 2 CAD cents :)
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759