Re: Bug reporting [Was: Promoting greater integration between testers!:)]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 14:53, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Owen Taylor">
> 
> > Fromthe GTK+ bug perspective I hate the idea of one more
> > step to deal with incoming bug reports ...
> 
> You can RESOLVE/WONTFIX an UNCONFIRMED bug, so it won't be an additional
> step unless you begin to avoid looking through UNCONFIRMED bugs as part of
> your developer-side process.

The point is not that we can't close bugs without confirming them, 
but that a great deal of incoming bugs for GTK+ *are* not immediate
closed. There are three approaches we could take:

 A) Just blanket confirm all GTK+ bugs periodically
 B) Try to decide on some objective criterion for confirming
    a GTK+ bug. (Picking some random recent bug, what would you
    say for http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116364?)
 C) Just leave bugs UNCONFIRMED

A) and B) are extra work, C) is aesthetically unappealing.
 
> (Which is unlikely in your case, as triaging is very much a developer-side
> process for GTK+, right? It's a more distributable process for GNOME's user
> facing products.)

I know. That's why I said my complaint was selfish. I thought about
suggesting a product-by-product policy, but considering that that
would probably take custom bugzilla hacking, I avoided it.

> > GTK's bugzilla problem can't be dealt with triaging; since if a bug is
> > closed immediately, it's quite frequently a RESOLVED/WONTFIX ... a
> > rejected RFE and thus some sort policy decision.
> 
> What are the major GTK+ bugzilla problems?

Well, the GTK+ "bugzilla problem" is that we are rapidly heading
for 1000+ open bugs against GTK+, which is partly not a problem...
GTK+ is a big project with lots of potential improvements, but 
also a problem because real fixable issues get lost in the pile.

There's no real solution other than scaling up the GTK+ project so
we can fix bugs/apply patches more quickly. There really are a lot
of quite tackleable bugs in GTK+ CVS for non-GTK+-experts, but generally
unless a bug has a fix in it immediately, it tends to wait until
one of the core GTK+ team members gets to it.)

And being even more ruthless with the WONTFIX on the RFE's.

Regards,
						Owen