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

[Nicu Buculei]

Bryce Harrington wrote:
> 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.

I see it from the opposite direction: our past experience with Mantis 
showed a very small number of bug reports (this may be because our 
project was very young at that time but also because is not a very 
complex project, so we don't have many places where bugs will appear).
So I expect less than one bug report per week, which will make us to 
just forget about the tracker existence and do not check it manually 
from time to time.
The main benefit I see in having a default owner is that the bug report 
will send an email to some inbox and make somebody remember about the 
tracker.