[Libreoffice-qa] What should we do with bugs filed against Extensions/Templates?

[Robinson Tryon]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Robinson Tryon
<bishop.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> The basic problem is that bugs are filed against Extensions and
> Templates in the same manner as bugs filed against LibreOffice proper.
> We had general agreement that the developer of the Extension should be
> responsible for dealing with his own bugs, but there are some wrinkles
> and caveats:

I've thought quite a bit about the best way for us to handle these
bugs, and I'm now of the opinion that the primary issue doesn't lie
with our bugtracker, but with the overarching system we've put in
place. I've come up with a couple of different ways that we can
approach the problem, and after writing up the details of both
approaches, it's possible that a synthesis of the two approaches may
work as well :-)

In any case, I think that we need to keep two things in mind when we
construct our process:

1) It's really important that we be up-front with our users about the
kind of support that they can expect for a particular add-on or
extension.
2) We need to communicate our strategy clearly and effectively to
other teams in the LibreOffice project (e.g. the volunteers on the Ask
site), so that we all provide a complete and consistent message to end
users.

If we don't follow #1 and #2, it doesn't matter what process we come
up with: we'll look disorganized and our users will become frustrated
and confused.


Here are the different approaches:

A) We provide a strict structure for the Extensions/Templates sites
that integrates extension developers into our process.

B) We clearly and explicitly inform users about which
Extensions/Templates have official support and which ones have
unofficial support from the developers themselves.

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A) We provide a strict structure for the Extensions/Templates sites
that integrates extension developers into our process.

In this approach we would curate the add-on sites and provide some
assurances regarding user support.

Developers wishing to add Extensions or Templates would become the
maintainer for the extension and be required to supply
- And email address
- A Bugzilla account
- Some kind of guarantee on how long they'll be willing to support the add-on

Any bugs filed against the extension would be assigned to the
maintainer(s) of the extension.

We could ping maintainers of Extensions from time to time (e.g.
whenever we bump the minor version number), and check-in to make sure
that
- They're still interested in providing support
- They're interested in porting the extension to the new release of LO
(if necessary)

If an extension falls into disrepair, we could
- Remove the extension
- Grey-out the extension page and/or put some big warnings on it
- Offer other developers the opportunity to assume the maintainer role
for this extension


B) We clearly and explicitly inform users about which
Extensions/Templates have official support and which ones have
unofficial support from the developers themselves.

Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) requiring developers to assume
a maintainer role for the extensions they author, the add-ons sites
would include much more details and use clear symbols like badges to
let users know if an extension has Official Support, or Unofficial/No
support. We make this information VERY prominent on the page, so that
they're fully aware of what kind of support to expect BEFORE they even
install an extension.

We could provide extension developers some kind of opt-in system
whereby they would be able to indicate to the user their commitment to
support the software.  (I'm not sure how this would work -- perhaps
the developer would just have to ping us, or perhaps it would be some
kind of formulaic thing based on how much positive/negative feedback
the developer or his extensions had received).

In this approach, if a bug is filed against an Unsupported extension
for which we have no developer contact, we mark the bug as NOTOURBUG,
politely point the user to the extension page, and indicate that the
extension is Unsupported.

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Thoughts on these proposals?


Cheers,
--R