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

[Robinson Tryon]

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 6:30 AM, Norbert Thiebaud <nthiebaud at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...
>
> 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'

IMHO 'the guys doing the work should choose' means 'we're going to
leave it up to the best judgment of those people to decide'.

I thought that we had a bunch of okay abbreviations, and aside from
tdf# (which I wanted to reserve for future use), all of the other
names seemed good enough to me, and didn't raise any red flags when I
checked-in with the ESC.

So, with that information in hand, I figured that I would ask for
input from QA, first in the form of searching for consensus, and
second (if need be) as a voting process. QA doesn't get to make
decisions like this very often, so I thought it would be something fun
for us to decide as a team.

Alternatively, if we want to interpret this message as ' *only* the
guys doing the work should choose', then that's fine with me, too. By
my reckoning, that list includes

- Cloph (for fixing bots and websites, creating DNS redirects, and
generally putting up with all of my requests)
- Dennis Roczek (for a bunch of detailed bot work translating urls on the wiki)
- Andras Timar (for updating urls in the translations and core git repos)
- Tollef (Doing all of the work on the FDO end)
- Me (for doing a lot of legwork on the migration)
- Some others I've undoubtedly forgotten

> 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_).

ok

> 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'.

ok

> 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)

Up at the top of your email you said:
"I'm sorry I apparently started a bikeshed on this..."

...but the length and breadth of your email belies that
characterization of this particular decision about abbreviations. This
is clearly not a bikeshed decision, or you and Mat would (hopefully)
not be so invested in what abbreviation is chosen.

If it's a big deal, then yes, I agree we should pay more attention to
it. If it's not a big deal, then we go ahead and pick from the list. I
just need to get a clear message, one way or the other.

I'm sympathetic to input from the developers, even at a late stage in
this process, which is precisely why I listened to Eike's comments and
wrote "The devs really like lo# (as it gives them more room in commit
messages)."

Cheers,
--R