Re: bugzilla (and desk guide) [was: a patch for tasklist segfaulting...]

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

Dennis Bjorklund <db zigo dhs org> writes:

> It crashes every time one turns on thumbnails in the preferences. And this
> have been filed as bugs in the bugtracker system many, many times. I did a
> quick scan and found a couple of them. But I guess that there is many more
> hiding under many of the ones that have the word crash or segfault in the
> summary.

Same for me. Debian woody from yesterday.

> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38382
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38113
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35526
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51170
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37661
> 
> All the same bug. I would have marked four of them as duplicates of the
> other, but it seems that I can't. I guess I don't have to authority to do
> that. I don't know why.
> 
> I talked with people on irc the other day about this bug and many people
> could reproduce it right away.
> 
> Bugzilla is full of bugs saying that desk guide crashes. Maybe someone
> should go over the list and mark bugs that are old and that seems to be
> fix as WORKSFORME. That's the usual thing to do when you don't know if a
> bug applies any more and where it seems to be working. Then the reporter
> can reopen the bug if he wants to and if not one can think of the bug as
> gone..
> 
> I entered a bug about desk guide
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52020
> 
> but I have no hope of that anyone will look at it. It says that a mail was
> sent to
> 
> gnome-core-maint bugzilla gnome org
> 
> which means nothing to me. Maybe there is no one at all reading on this
> adress. Comparing with mozilla, there you see a couple of real
> mailadresses to the people that wan't the bugreport for a certain area.
> And after a while you get to know the people that gets the bugreports and
> it's easier to get a dialog going.

Unfortunately, this is impossible for us. You need to wait until at least
Bugzilla 3 for this.

At the moment, each component must have exactly one default owner. This must
be ONE email address and not a list of people. So the only way to get multiple
people there is to use that alias.

But what matters, some people even don't want to get bug reports for their
products per mail, they just go to Bugzilla and look for open bugs when they're
preparing things for a release or when they have time for.

And personally, I prefer having bugs assigned to unknown bugzilla gnome org
(which goes to /dev/null) that to someone who just happens to be the maintainer
but who will never look at them.

I normally only assign a bug report to myself if I'm actually going to fix it.

> Why is there an extra step where it's sent to gnome-core-maint, which
> probably is just a list of the interested people. Why isn't that list
> directly in bugzilla just as in mozillas case.

Mozilla is a different project than GNOME. Since Mozilla is a company it's
easy for them to say that person Foo is responsible for all bugs in component
Bar and that Foo must fix them within X days.

But this isn't how things work in a Free Software project like GNOME. Here
people are doing stuff like they feel like so whoever is on that list is there
because he/she is interested in this stuff.

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