[Libreoffice-qa] Proposal: Calls for Testing

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi Petr, Hi Rainer,

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:37:33AM +0200, Petr Mladek wrote:
> > Because I am currently trying to reduce mail LibO mail flood because I 
> > miss too many important mails, it might be that I will have to block 
> > those [CFT].
> 
> I suffer from this as well. Well, it is perfectly fine to filter mails
> by subject. We do not want hundreds of mailing lists. One person can't
> handle all request on a high traffic mailing list. I filter many mails
> this way.

Thats actually one part of the original intention:
- making it easy to filter it out (or sort it in a extra mailfolder)
- making it easy to explicitly filter for those later
  (e.g. when a rc is out to blog about the stuff people can test)

> > I wonder whether for most test requests a Bug would be a more consequent 
> > solution.
> > 
> > If there has not been a Bug report, the developer creates one with 
> > Status PLEASETEST (currently not used here), adds descriptions due to 
> > Bjoern's suggestions, everybody who did tests adds himself to "CC", and 
> > if someone finds a problem, he submits a new Bug with "Blocks Testbug". 
> > I believe that would reach possible testers more determined than 
> > announcements on qa mailing list.
> 
> The bugzilla solution makes some sense because QA people work with
> bugzilla a lot.

Having a bug is a good idea in general, but promoting/enforcing it is tricky.
E.g. policies like "you need to have a bug number for each commit" is causing
lots and lots of trouble. It is great for real bugs, but does not work so well
for metabugs/features/tiny fixes.
Enforcing that at OOo let to evasion like the i#10000 bug number being used for
"Im to lazy to write a real bug". And for features these bugs will fill up with
"You should do it different! No, this is the way I wanted to implement
it!"-discussions for which bugzilla isnt suited too well. 

> Well, I would prefer to keep this on the mailing list for now. I hope
> that it might help to attract more people. Bugzilla is a kind of swamp.
> Mailing list is more user friendly and interactive. We need more people
> that will discuss QA and become active members :-)

Agree. The CFT mails should be an _additional_ path of communication for
information from development to the outside world.

Best,

Bjoern