Re: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal) writes:

> Unless Bug Buddy is taught how to automagically pick the correct 
> bugtracker for a package (and I somehow doubt that will work 
> correctly, at least at this stage), I would hate to see us push *any* 
> of the packages out of bugzilla.gnome.org.  It will just result in 
> lost or misfiled reports, and probably a few conspiracy theories 
> about trying to push small projects out of GNOME. :)

Rejecting such bug reports (and even silently dropping them if the sender's
system is misconfigured (no valid email address)) is the only way to do it.

Look at the current situation in bugs.gnome.org; such bugs are currently
accepted by the system but nobody ever looks at them. They're just slowing
the whole system down and eating up resources.

Telling people "your bug report has been rejected for reason blah, blah, blubb"
is way better to just let it go to some file somewhere in a spool directory
where nobody ever looks at it.

> Is there really a marginal resource cost for each product/component 
> on Bugzilla?

Yes, there is. Even a non-acceptably large one. But we need to distinguish
three cases here:

a) it's not a GNOME bug or some trash like SPAM

Sure, one such bug doesn't hurt. But someone needs to close it. If nobody
closes it immediately, we'll have 10.000 such bugs in a year or two and
then sometimes someone must look at them and close them since otherwise it'd
make the system slowly unusable and we won't be able to see the real bugs
anymore.

b) the bug report is for a package nobody cares about

If a package is abandoned, has no maintainer and nobody is ever fixing its
bugs, then their bug reports will have the same faith as in a).

c) the package has a bug tracker somewhere else

This is even the worst case. Both in a) and in b) it isn't really a loss to
silently drop that bug report since nobody will ever look at it anyways.

c1) it is submitted by someone with a broken system

This is bad since the bug report will be silently dropped without anyone
noticing it even if it is a valid bug report which may even get fixed
otherwise.

But what should we do here - if someone sends out an email to a mistyped
address and his From: line is incorrect, this mail will also end up in
/dev/null.

All we can do here is to tell people to make sure they have a working
mailing system before sending out bug reports. Applications like bug-buddy
can help to enforce this, for instance by refusing to send out bug reports
from addresses like * * localdomain and by telling people that they must
specify a working email address to submit a bug report.

c2) the submitter has a working system

To summarize, this is a bug report for a package which has a Bugtracker
somewhere and with a maintainer who is actually interested in bug reports
for his package and who's actually fixing such bugs. The submitter has a
working From: line so that he'll get and read a reply.

In this case, we _must_ reject the bug report and tell the submitter where
to send it. Not doing this effectively means that this bug report will be
discarded (since it'll end up somewhere in bugzilla.gnome.org where the
maintainer of the package will never look) while it would have been fixed
if the submitter sent it to the correct address.

We cannot expect package maintainers to keep track of more than one bug
tracking system for their package, so it's only fair to help them to avoid
that their bug reports are cluttered all over x different bug tracking
systems while they should all be in one system.

This applies especially for Nautilus and Evolution bugs; both the Nautilus
and the Evolution team have their own Bugzilla installations and they both
care a lot about their bug reports, so we need to make sure that their bug
reports all go to the right place.

> (And Martin: Thanks for your work on the bugtracker--- it may have 
> been unacknowledged, but it wasn't unnoticed.)

Yeah, it start to realize that I was just very, very annoyed this morning.
It really needs to stop raining outside, I hate this weather.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)