bug triage considered useful?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 11:05 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Wed, 14 May 2008, Matt Domsch wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 05:07:52PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > Provoking question:
> > >
> > > Am I the only person in Fedora who considers this bug triaging (esp.
> > > today's) to be producing more noise and spam than useful results?
> >
> >
> > Having had to personally deal with tens of thousands of bugs / bug
> > reports / issues / resolutions in the 9+ years I've been actively
> > developing Linux, I'm glad for _anyone_ who steps up and tries to
> > actively manage this list.  Issues get resolved but not closed.
> > Issues get reported but lack follow-up (either developer or reporter)
> > on occasion.  Eventually these need to get pruned, like any good
> > garden, leaving only the actual problems which need focus.  The Triage
> > effort is designed to do exactly this.
I am not denying this kind of job needs to be done, nor I am I denying
this to be an unthankful job, but ... I am questioning their approach.

> > Does it generate some additional mail?  Yes.  Are they taking steps to
> > minimize the extra mail?  Yes.  But does that mail generation negate
> > the good they're accomplishing?  IMHO, No.
IMO, it "negates the good". 

They mail-bomb reporters, they mail-bomb maintainers, they flood
mailing-lists, they render bugzilla entries unreadable, they produce
plenty of superfluous/bogus reports ... 

All in all, I find the collateral damage to be too high, because they do
not fix the causes for PRs to pile up but are "playing with symptoms".

> Agreed, its a completely thankless job and an easy target but after these
> begining steps are over and the team is into a cycle I think it will do a
> great deal of good.

Well, I do not agree. As far as I am concerned as reporter and
maintainer, all they have done is to close a hardly measurable number of
PRs which had really become outdated because the "package maintainer had
ignored it" and caused nothing but spam on the overwhelming majority of
open PRs.

Ralf