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

[Carl Worth]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006 17:44:06 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> What you can do is CC them with a one line note.  Works good enough as
> soon as they have a bugzilla account.

That's still only adding individuals, one at a time. I've seen enough
good stuff come from people "out of the blue" on the cairo list to
know that we would never be as successful as we are by just asking
individuals to do things (recent, excellent contributions from Daniel
and Joonas are a good example of this). I've got another example which
is the recent locking fixes posted by Monty in bugzilla. I'll follow
up to the list about those since I want more input on them.

So, rather than me (or anyone) selecting specific people to see bug
reports, I'd much rather if _all_ cairo programmers saw all the
messages and chose to work on the things they were capable of.

And as for one-liner CC's from bugzilla, I often get these from
mozilla's bugzilla instance. One of the most obnoxious things about
them is that I get almost no context with them. For example, I just
got one today that reads more or less as follows:

	Subject: [Bug ABCXYZ] Cairo does something wrong.

	Do not reply to this email.  You can add comments to this bug at
	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=ABCXYZ

	------- Comment #2 from someone at mozilla.org  2006-11-22 13:17 PST -------
	carl? any idea here?

Nothing against the mozilla maintainers here, (this is bugzilla's
fault), but that's an awful email message. If I got something with
context then I could at least reply to it.

> 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.

I'm unconvinced. It would ensure that all the cairo developers are
getting the bug reports, but we get an awful lot of noise there too,
(like the many duplicated reports for unsupported visual types), that
I don't think would be appreciated by people who read cairo@ as users
only of the library.

And even if we did, then we'd start getting messages posted to cairo@
saying "don't reply here". What's the point of starting a conversation
on the mailing list if it can't be continued there?

Anyway, this is just me ranting here. I'd love to have much better
integration of our bug tracking together with our mailing lists and
our source-code management, (I think I've mentioned before that I'd
love to have one branch per bug and use git to get at submitted
patches rather than going to the bugzilla interface to get at them).

-Carl
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