Draft for 'Bugzilla processes and procedures' mail to developers

John Poelstra poelstra at redhat.com
Fri Apr 3 00:00:30 UTC 2009


Adam Williamson said the following on 04/02/2009 01:29 PM Pacific Time:
> On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 21:22 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
> 
>>> Hi, -devel-list folks!
>>>
>>> We in the Bugzappers team (part of the QA group) are working to revise
>>> our Wiki space, and as part of that, various questions have arisen with
>>> regards to Bugzilla procedures. A lot of the same issues have come up on
>>> this list in the recent past.
>>>
>>> In general, it seems like Fedora doesn't really have a properly defined
>>> procedure for exactly how a bug should flow. Every maintainer, reporter
>>> and triager has a slightly different idea of what each status or
>>> resolution or keyword means, and when and by whom they should be
>>> applied.
>> I think you are overstating a problem that I'm not sure exists.  We have 
>> defined the states here:
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow
>> Why not improve on what is there?
> 
>> I think it is great you want to tackle and clarify these things.  Having 
>> gone through a round myself with this process I guess I learned that 
>> some ambiguity wasn't as harmful as I first thought. :)
> 
> You're right, of course. Somehow I'd forgotten about that flow.
> 
> So, I will revise the draft substantially. :) Here's my quick thoughts:
> 
> The obvious bit of hand-waviness in the graphic is the resolutions, we
> don't define them (and it doesn't list some at all). DUPLICATE is
> simple, and ERRATA and RAWHIDE are known: fixed bugs in official
> releases are closed as ERRATA (should be done automatically), and fixed
> bugs in Rawhide are closed as RAWHIDE (manually). Those we can write
> down into that page without any discussion, I think.
> 
> We do, however, need to define what 'cantfix', 'wontfix', 'notabug',
> and 'worksforme' are for. We should also explicitly state which
> resolutions aren't used for Fedora (I think 'deferred', 'currentrelease'
> and 'nextrelease' fit into this category) so they don't get used on
> Fedora bugs by mistake.

Yes, I agree these were never clearly defined on the wiki page and I 
can't remember why, though even now I'm wondering how important it is 
that we use the right reason and what we would use it for.

> It would really be nice, in fact, if we could have Bugzilla only show
> the statuses and resolutions appropriate to the product the bug is filed
> on...not sure if that's possible, though.

I can ask the Red Hat bugzilla team about this.

John




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list