bug triage considered useful?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 15:24 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> 
> > Well, I haven't seen a single useful posting from them today, just bogus
> > reports.
> 
> Fedora 7 is going EOL in 30 days.  This isn't bogus, it's a fact.
In bugzilla, most reporters use the "version" in the sense of "first
version of Fedora" having been affected by a bug.

Now, you are spamming them the reporters with mails, effectively pushing
them around demanding action on something they are not responsible for.
=> you are driving away reporters.

At the same time, you are forcing maintainers to waste time on actions
on something they likely are aware about.

At least to me, as a maintainer, the effect most of the triage mails I
received in recent days had, was me to reopen/change the version tags in
PRs they complained about and to extend my MUA's /dev/null-filter.

> Moreover, the process that we're following had been submitted for
> review, comment, and approval within the community for quite some time
> prior to it's execution.  In fact, at one point I was BEGGING for
> feedback on it [1].
I have always been opposed to this kind of triage ... IIRC, I had spoken
up, then, but I am not sufficiently interested in this kind of job and
am too busy with other tasks, to be wanting to get further involved into
it. - Now, I am only complaining, because your deeds are showing to have
too much of an impact on me.

>  If you can suggest something better for Fedora
> 10, some concrete area in which we did the wrong thing (preferably
> along with suggestions of what the right thing would have been), I'm
> all ears.
>
> [1]  http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-March/msg01199.html
> 

IMHO, the essential effect your triage-robot has, is cosmetics to the
bug number statistics, without actually fixing much. 

I feel, a human (or a team), "systematically and *sustainably*
inspecting old bugs" and - more important - taking _immediate_ action on
new reports, would be a better approach. It would help getting bugs
fixed, instead of seeing them "closed" after they had been lingering
around much too long.

That said, IMHO, the essential effect your triage-robot has, is
cosmetics to the bug number statistics, without actually fixing much. 

Ralf