[Clipart] [Fwd: [Bug 3215] OCAL: Add a category for openclipart.org bugs]

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 03:53:41PM +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> Jon Phillips wrote:
> Your list of categories looks fine to me, every problem I can think of 
> fit one of them.
> I don't think 'releases' is a worthy category, so I will NOT propose it.
> 
> As I see in the bug, default owners are needed for each category, you 
> may want to assign different persons to spread the load, for example:
> - dms: I think here Bryce is the most appropriate as the owner
> - website: the initial design was yours, so you are the most 
> knowledgeable about it, but this is not a very hard task, you can pass 
> it to somebody else, like Turnip or me;
> - clipart: here anybody can be owner, if needed I am available;
> - tools: the first person about I think here is Jonadab, I guess the 
> majority of tools are made by him.
> I think with such a spread of the tasks we can accomplish fast and 
> useful resolution for bugs.

The most effective bug trackers I've been involved with have actually
set the default owner to nobody.  This shows itself to be effective on
several counts - first, bug assignee's can control the quantity of work
they get committed to (nothing sucks more than to close one bug only to
get auto-assigned three more). Second, it communicates to the bug
submitter when someone has actually looked at their bug and taken at
least the preliminary action of assigning it; auto-assigning gives the
(unfortunately false) impression that someone takes responsibility for
every submitted bug; honestly, many bugs in open source projects never
gain a developer, so it's useful to distinguish between them.  Third, it
allows the bug tracker to be used as a wide-open todo list, in the sense
that a new participant can look through the bug list for the ones no one
owns and pick ones that look interesting to do.

Bryce