Fwd: closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[Jon Stanley]

On Jan 4, 2008 7:10 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:

> Yeah, indeed. But I think thats part of the problem.... We get
> backloged and the first thought is to do something about the backlog,

The backlog that would be eliminated by this action is about 1/3 of
the currently open Fedora bugs.

> but that doesn't really solve the problem, just keeps us in a cycle.
> I think we need to look at the entire problem and come up with a full
> solution, or at least a full attempted solution.

This is why I'm going to FUDCon, to come up with  a solution with the
maximum amount of community input.  I encourage anyone coming to
FUDCon that has an opinion on this topic to show up and provide their
input  - without community input and buy-in, there's no way that I can
be successful in this effort.

> I think there are several problems here:
>
> 1. There is a big backlog of bugs that aren't getting attention.

That's why it's necessary to "clear the deck".  To give some current stats:

FC1-FC6 have 3,811 in any status other than CLOSED [1]
F7 has 2073 bugs open [2]
F8 has 2066 bugs open [3]
rawhide has 5638 bugs currently open [4]

I'm looking for a way to search rawhide bugs that have not been
changed since 2007-06-01, however that seems to be a bit of a tall
order with the current bugziila interface - however I have a hunch
that the number is probably about half of the open ones.

> 2. There are more bugs flowing in than maintainers are dealing with,
> which adds to the backlog over time.

That's where the triage team comes in, putting sane priorities on
things and managing maintainer workload.  Again, this is all part of
the grand effort to *build* a triage team.

> 3. Some high profile packages have so many new bugs that there is no way
> any single maintainer could handle them.

See 2.  The number of actual, unique, high-priority bugs that come in
against these packages I assume is perfectly manageable.  Also, keep
in mind that high-profile packages generally have a team of
maintainers working on them, especially the ones that we are upstream
for.

> 4. There is no flow from/to upstream projects (or very little). I know
> from my own Xfce bugs when something is a upstream issue, I usually
> file the upstream bug, follow it and then close the fedora bug when
> it's fixed upstream or a patch is available. Thats very very labor
> intensive.

There's nothing that says a maintainer has to do this.  A triager can
equally well file an upstream bug - the thing is, I think at that
point, it's the responsibility of the reporter to follow the upstream
bug.  I also think that UPSTREAM should not be a closing status - it
should be rather 'this is on hold while we're waiting for upstream to
do something about it, come back once they do and the Fedora
maintainer can make a decision to incorporate or not'

> I think most people are concentrating on the backlog issue to the
> exclusion of all the other issues, and I think those need solutions
> before doing anything to the backlog makes sense.

+4000

> For problems 2 and 3, refer to:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/PackageStatus#head-181b0c70022aca0d7aa42d42f7ed12a553189882
> for maintainers with the most bugs.

Didn't know this existed, thanks!

> Sure, but if the reporter doesn't respond, or the maintainer can't
> reproduce on the current release, then they can close it... instead of
> forcing the submitter to re-open it. A lot of people will just not want
> to deal with the hassle.

How about finding a common ground?  Placing them in NEEDINFO_REPORTER
for a week and then auto-close those that are still in that state?

> If it's easy for them to do so.

It's trivial.  That's why I mentioned the 'clone as bug' feature of
bugzilla.  My guess is that some (a lot?) of the people who would
reopen a bug are not the assignee or reporter (or a triager), and thus
would not have the proper bugzilla permissions to re-open.  That's
where the clone comes in.

> Thats no good in my opinion, because then the bugs would be ignored.
> You might as well close them and tell the submitter for sure the bug
> isn't going to be dealt with.

+20,000

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=unmaintained-open&namedowner=jonstanley%40gmail.com
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=F7-open&namedowner=jonstanley%40gmail.com
[3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=F8-open&namedowner=jonstanley%40gmail.com
[4] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=rawhide-open&namedowner=jonstanley%40gmail.com