package shepherding

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 17:05, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> > What the overwhelming majority of people reporting bugs do not 
> > realize, is that engineers receiving the bug reports, do not sit 
> > in bugzilla 24/7 just fixing bugs.
> 
> I do realize that very well. Otoh fixing bugs seems important to me. So
> if you can't spend enough time fixing bugs then I would say management
> is to blame.

That is very much not true. Do you think we should be doing nothing but
bug work? Any software *always* have bugs, so that would mean we'd
*never* do any feature work or any other kind of important work. We'd
ship a piece of stagnant software (if we ever got our noses out of
bugzilla to spend time actually shipping it). A bugfree version of a 10
year old piece of software. Nobody wants that. 

And then there is the volume of bugs. I don't remember the last time I
actually had time to do a bugzilla query. I spend almost all my bugzilla
time just reading the incoming bugzilla mail, trying to keep my head
over the water. Reading the mail and fixing the most important ones as
they come in basically take all my time.

One could say its the fault of management that there aren't 10x as many
engineers as we have now so we'd have time to fix more things. But, that
won't happen because we just don't have that kind of money. The idea of
course is that this is free software, so anyone could fix the bugs.
However, I very rarely see anyone fixing any of the non-trivial bugs I
own (and I own thousands of them, so I wouldn't mind some help).

> > In 3 years of experience on the receiving end of bug reports, and 
> > having played "bug-priority-tag" with at least one or two people 
> > a month for the first 6-8 months, I realized the priority field 
> > was useless for the purposes that *I* was trying to use it for, 
> > which was to indicate what priority the bug DOES have.
> 
> I can understand that Alexander and you don't feel like educating the
> user every time this happens, but is this mentioned in the bugzilla
> accompanying docs? Just a warning: How not to piss of a developer by
> repeatedly changing tags and make him loose interest in your problem.

I may be a pessimist, but I doubt anyone would read any such docs.

> > Since the priority field is so useless, I just totally stopped
> > ever even looking at it period.
> 
> Maybe the tag should be kept around, just as a decoy, so users don't
> start playing "bug-severity-tag" with you ;) .

Thats basically what it is now. (To me at least.)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an obese voodoo farmboy who dotes on his loving old ma. She's a 
bloodthirsty communist Valkyrie with only herself to blame. They fight crime!