Better organization of bugs with meta bugs

[Jay Philips]

Hi All,

With the ability to only set the component field to classify bugs to a 
very basic level, i believe that meta bugs should be used to further 
classify things and provide a needed means of grouping bugs.

The keywords and whiteboard fields have been useful for developers to 
hunt down bugs they want to work on, but QA users not aware of these 
tags wont set them, which means that some bugs wont appear in such 
searches. The 'see also' field has been used to group similar bugs 
together, but how closely related these bugs are isnt defined with this 
association and having a large list of bugs in the see also area is a 
clutter.

With the usage of meta bugs, the QA team will be able to

1) Easily group related bugs under a clear meta bug heading, like for a 
language group, GSoC project, vcl backend, dialog, etc.

examples
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83066
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85184
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102495
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103238

2) Easily find duplicate bugs of a particular topic by only searching 
through the bugs in a particular meta bug, which can easily be done with 
bugzilla's search or by clicking on the 'show dependency tree' link 
found on the meta bug page and then clicking on the 'show resolved' 
button on the dependency tree page to show close bugs.

examples
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=99671&hide_resolved=0
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=88278&hide_resolved=0

3) Organize bugs not only under one main meta bug, but also have 
sub-meta bugs and sub-sub-meta bugs to provide an hierarchically 
organized structure to the bugs.

example
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102019
|- https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94551
    |- https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103223
       |- https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34551

4) Notifying other users CCed on a meta bug of a related bug that they 
can possibly triage and fix.

Meta bugs have also helped developers in providing a central place for 
them to find all the related bugs of a particular topic they want to 
work on, as creating a new keyword or whiteboard tag for this grouping 
isnt efficient.

examples
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81234
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91063
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91310

So i encourage all users to associate meta bugs to bug reports they 
submit and triage and create a new meta bug if a suitable one isnt 
available and they have seen enough similar bugs of a similar topic. 
Adding an alias for the meta bug is also encouraged, as it will appear 
on the page of associated bugs rather than the bug number. For a list of 
all available meta bugs, you can find the "Meta bugs" search query[1] 
listed in the "Saved Searches" tab[2] of Preferences in Bugzilla.

I've created many meta bugs over the last few months and would 
appreciate everyones help in making them as complete as possible. I have 
just finished cleaning up the sidebar meta bug[3] over the last 2 days, 
as it had over 150 bugs associated with it, and plan to continue further 
organizing its sub-meta bugs into sub-sub-meta bugs when necessary.

----

[1] 
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=dorem&remaction=run&namedcmd=Meta%20bugs&sharer_id=22399

[2] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=saved-searches

[3] 
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=65138&hide_resolved=0