dormant bugs and our perception

[Matej Cepl]

On 2008-01-02, 16:07 GMT, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> Maybe.  GNOME certainly tries this, as does Ubuntu.  But 
> Ubuntu's triage situation isn't much better than ours, from 
> what I can tell.
>
> First, though, there needs to be someone who says "I Am The 
> Bugmaster For Fedora."  If the right leader emerges, the rest 
> would probably follow quite naturally from that, I think.

I am not the one, I can only say that I am *a* bugmaster for the 
Red Hat desktop team (employed by Red Hat). I can clearly see 
that there is a huge need for bug triaging team on our bugzilla, 
but let me add couple of notes here (actually is is getting 
pretty long):

* I have no clue how to create the team -- it should be probably 
  done by somebody how would be more skilled in actual
  team-building and stuff like that, than somebody able to plow 
  through bugzilla.
* There is a need to create a lot of documentation -- the stuff 
  which is available inside our Bugzilla is mostly obsolete
  and/or misleading. Some stuff is available on gnome.org, but 
  their problems are slightly different than ours, about which 
  later.
  We tried inside of the desktop team to build some Bug Triaging 
  policy. It is not finished yet (and it has desktop bias), so 
  just as an information about what we are thinking about it is 
  available at 
  http://mcepl.fedorapeople.org/docs/bug-triaging-guide.xhtml 
  Comments are more than welcome.
* Gnome.org and their bug triaging is often used as an example 
  how to do it.
  Certainly, Luis did a lot of great work, but when we were 
  talking about it in summer (when he was interning in the Red 
  Hat legal department), we came to the conclusion that the 
  situation in our bugzilla is quite different.
  The biggest concern of their bug triaging is to deal with the 
  flood of bug-buddy generated thousands of duplicates for 
  crashes in Gnome programs. On the one hand the flood is 
  intense, on the other hand, it is quite easily possible to 
  diagnose and massage these bugs with some scripts (see 
  http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/TriageGuide/FindingDuplicates 
  and related pages).
  Our bugs are all hand-written and very diverse in their 
  formats, so there is probably not much any script can do. We 
  have fewer duplicates than them, but each of them have to be 
  really opened by humans, analyzed, and decided upon. That means 
  that many strategies and ideas, they developed, is not directly 
  applicable to us.
* If I can judge by my almost-a-year-long experience with desktop 
  (and especially xorg), it seems to me that the one of the 
  biggest problems is lack of the bug retention policy.  If our 
  bugzilla is supposed to be a tool for developers, we must get 
  keep cleaning our BZ for all bugs which will most likely be 
  never dealt with and keep all remaining active bugs fresh all 
  the time. See the above draft of the bug triaging policy for 
  some ideas I have on this.
* Other issue (which doesn't happen in Gnome bugzilla at all) is 
  upstreaming -- what bugs should go upstream, and how to deal 
  with them in our BZ. Again, although some improvement can be 
  made by developing of some tools for doing the work, there is 
  plenty of work which could be done by bug triagers -- if we 
  just don't want to dump our trash over the fence to 
  a neighbor's garden, we have to search upstream bugzillas (or 
  other bug databases) for the upstream bugs, and to maintain the 
  link between the state of them and our bug.
  Concerning the dealing with them in our BZ -- when we close 
  them as UPSTREAM, it is kind of hypocritical situation. We just 
  don't want to see them anymore. However, IMHO the proper 
  solution would be to deal with the upstream bugzilla as a kind 
  of developer -- the bug should be (kind of) ASSIGNED to it, and 
  when the upstream generates a patch (or new release containing 
  the fix) we should apply it and QA it (at least by asking 
  reporter to test the new package)
* And there is no magical solution -- “drastic measures” will 
  IMHO not provide long term solution to our problems, and will 
  (if they will make any change at all) just hide them and delay 
  the proper solution.

That's probably all what goes through my head just now.

Any reactions?

Matej