[Libreoffice-qa] Version field options way too fine grained

Bjoern Michaelsen bjoern.michaelsen at canonical.com
Fri Mar 14 09:16:11 PDT 2014


Hi Kohei,

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 09:58:00AM -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> I have my saved query and try to select all relevant versions but it's
> prone to errors.  Today I just discovered a regression that I didn't see
> before because its version field was set to 4.2.0.0alpha0+Master which I
> didn't include in my saved search.

What I usually do is to simply use a regexp on the version field (in the custom
search section). Not pretty, usually a working workaround.

> IMO we should only have 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 etc as version.  All these too
> fine grained version numbers only serve to make bugs discoverable.
> What do you guys think about this?

Personally, I think that could work. We should then have a way to highlight a
bug via whiteboard status if it is indeed one of those rare regressions in a
point release (e.g. worked in 4.2.0, doesnt work in 4.2.1). Ubuntu uses
regression-release vs. regression-update to separate those -- we could do
something similar.

There is a social component to this though: Quite a few QA volunteers have many
LibreOffice versions installed to identify the earliest release this is in and
we would break their workflow (and some of the tools created for that, like
SI-GUI).

OTOH, ultimately for developers in almost all cases a bibisect that pins down a
regression to some 50-100 commits on master is almost always preferable for
debugging over testing rcs and official releases which end up at "was
introduced somewhere between 4.0.6 and 4.1.0 beta" or the like in 99% of the
cases as stuff really rarely rarely regresses on a release branch. A range of
4.0.6-4.1.0~beta isnt too helpful, as that is still a few thousand commits.

So IMHO we can consider doing that -- but we need to be careful to move people
from testing all the release branch versions (somewhat pointlessly) to testing
master version (via bibisect repos, lots of daily builds or whatever) instead
of losing them, which wouldnt be helpful. That likely needs quite a bit of
advertising to massage the message in and change the mindset.

Best,

Bjoern

P.S.: For the BSA it would make sense to still ask the whole version (and even
maybe where that version is from: distro or TDF), but not write it down
completely in the version field (just use 4.1/4.2 there), but put the rest in
the description so we dont loose it (not for querying, but when one walks
through the comments).


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