[Libreoffice-qa] Bugzilla Migration: Abbreviation to replace fdo#12345

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Robinson Tryon
<bishop.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I felt like I was working hard to go through appropriate channels.
> Perhaps if I'd spent more time I could've gotten more input from other
> groups, but at this point I feel like I've already spent a ton of time
> on just this one little piece.

Yeah, you did well. I'm sorry I apparently started a bikeshed on this...
I have missed ESC of nov 21st (my fault), but 'the guys doing the work
should choose'
is not 'the guys doing the work should organize a beauty pageant election'
On the dev side we are not used to 'vote'. decisions are usually just
taken. When there is some controversy, the interested parties expose
the merit of their respective positions, explaining the rational for
their choice (and I mean _rational_ not _feelings_).
That usually lead to either a compromise to address each other points,
or the parties rallying around the rational of one side (we all have
'opinions' on anything when asked... but more often than not we do not
_care_ that much about a given topic, so unless we have a strong
argument to offer we usually do not demand that our opinions be
counted as strongly as the one of the people intimately involved with
the work and problems associated with it.. iow 'pick your battle
wisely'  :-) )), or more often a combination of both.
in 3 years we where driven to a vote only once.. and even then that
was more to have each position 'on the record'.

So in that light I would point out again the criteria _I_ think are
relevant for the name here:
1/ short. the summary commit message is the 1st line of a commit
message, and is limited to 80 chars (72 preferred), and when a commit
refer to a bug we want the bug reference in that message.
2/ obvious meaning and easy to remember and type, as much as possible.

The opposition I've seen so far to lo# are centered around 'it can be
confused with the abbreviation of the product'. I think that is a
feature not a bug.
in the context of bugzilla the use will always be lo#<number> the #
make it clear that it is a bug number and remove any ambiguity...
furtheremore these _are_ libreoffice bugs.. lo = libreoffice, # = bug
here.  So, other abbreviation may have merit, and may prevails, but
discarding lo# for that reason seems a red herring to me.

for reference a quick grep of the log message give use the following uses:

fdo#nnnn
deb#nnnn
n#nnnnn
#innnnnn#
rhbz#nnnnnn
CID#nnnnn
cp#nnnn
bnc#nnnn
abi#nnnn
i#nnnn
#nnnnn#
lp#nnnnn

and a mix bag of some mistyped variations thereof (like #fdonnnn)


Norbert