Help me triage

[John Poelstra]

Jeroen van Meeuwen said the following on 09/24/2008 05:17 AM Pacific Time:
> Steve Grubb wrote:
>> On Wednesday 24 September 2008 05:46:52 Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
>>>> Please leave my packages alone. I leave them in NEW until I've had a
>>>> chance to review them. If you change it, I may think I've already taken
>>>> some action action.
>>> I guess triagers hear this a lot... I know I've been talking to several
>>> people about this, but has a serious request for a CONFIRMED status or
>>> flag ever been put in with the bugzilla maintainers?
>>
>> Not by me, I'm generally too busy to read in detail all that is going 
>> on within Fedora. Its only when things affect me that I start talking 
>> about it. So, what does CONFIRMED mean? If something were not 
>> CONFIRMED, I still don't want people to close it before I look at it. 
>> Sometimes even an invalid bug has some good suggestions that I may 
>> want to consider.
>>
>> I also wonder what is the point of this exercise? A bug in NEW that is 
>> a year old is one thing, a bug that is in NEW for 1 day is another. It 
>> would seem that bugs over a certain age are really a problem that is 
>> "stuck" and may need intervention. But, its been my experience that 
>> getting bugs from NEEDINFO back to ASSIGNED or MODIFIED to CLOSED are 
>> where the problems are.
>>
> 
> Sorry, I maybe should have elaborated on a CONFIRMED status/flag a 
> little more;
> 
> Right now when a bug is created it is in status NEW. Triagers may or may 
> not fire at will at these bugs and get some additional information, 
> close the bug NOTABUG, see the bug is solved in NEXTRELEASE or RAWHIDE, 

We are NOT CLOSING bugs or making decisions like this for package 
maintainers except in cases where not enough information has been 
provided for more than 30 days.  Our workflow focuses on NEW bugs and 
bugs in NEEDINFO for > 30 days.


> whathaveyou. I *think* overall this helps people (like you?) in that you 
> don't need to hunt down additional information from people logging bogus 
> bugs against the packages you maintain, but like lots of other people, 
> we do not read all email we get from bugzilla (which right now is the 
> only real notification you get on the bug, if we don't take those bugs 
> into account that have not rightfully been set to ASSIGNED, right?).

Bugzilla provides very mail rich header information.  It is pretty easy 
to narrow down bugzilla email by reason that it is being sent to you.  I 
read every email for all the bugs I'm CCd on and ignore a lot of others.

> 
> However, from there (the NEW status), there is no additional available 
> indicator to let people know the bug has been "triaged" (someone has 
> requested additional information, the bug has been reproduced, etc.), 
> other then changing the status to "ASSIGNED" -which is what some people 
> are complaining about, which is understandable. Hence the thought about 
> a CONFIRMED status or flag, indicating "someone knowledgeable has looked 
> at the bug" -hopefully taking some workload off the shoulders of people 
> that are to actually resolve bugs.

Another possibility is the "Triaged" keyword which is already present. 
I can't remember why we decided against it in January.  I believe the 
original intention was to work within the existing bug states present 
without making the workflow too complicated.

> Since this is just an idea, I'd like to see what other people think 
> about ways of letting a triager indicate the bug is triaged/reviewed 
> without disturbing existing workflows too much...
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 

I'm curious to know how widespread of a "problem" it is that has our bug 
triagers moving bugs from NEW to ASSIGNED?  IOW how many package 
maintainers is this a problem for?  1, 2, 10, 100 ?  I'm not against 
trying fix this, just curious how significant the "problem" is?

John