GNOME2 Bug Triage guidelines

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

After some discussion with the release team (with the unexpected but
pleasant result of me joining said release team) I'm ready to present
the triage guidelines that will guide my work with bugzilla.gnome as we
all work towards gnome 2.0.

Let me preface the rest of this with a simple observation: my job is not
to shove standards down your throat if they don't work for you. My job
is to make fixing bugs as easy as possible for you. So if these
standards don't work for your project, let me know- we'll work something
out so that I can still help you with my time, the release team can
still have some clue about what is going on, and you can still work in
the way that works for you. [This is particularly true for projects that
aggressively use bugzilla now- nautilus and gtk come to mind, but I'm
sure there are smaller ones I'm not aware of. Please, drop me a note if
this doesn't work for you.]

The triage guidelines are fairly simple. To put them in a nutshell, I'm
going to be changing a couple flags that are unused in most of the
bugzilla so that you can figure out more easily which bugs are
important, and which are gnome 2 bugs, and then the release team is
going to use that information when planning for releases. In more
detail:

(1) All G2 bugs need to be marked as such. After some discussion, we're
going to use target milestones for this. It's imperfect, but so are
keywords. Later tonight or tomorrow, every product in bugzilla will get 
target milestones corresponding to GNOME2 Beta, RC1, Final, and
'post-GNOME2' [G2Beta, G2RC1, G2.0, G2.x]. If a bug's target milestone
is set to one of these four, it is a bug in GNOME 2. The first three are
GNOME 2 bugs that ought to be fixed for the actual 2.0 release; the
closer we get to 2.0 the tougher it'll be to mark a bug G2.0. The G2.x
milestone will keep track of those bugs that are in GNOME2 but not
fixable or not prioritized for the 2.0 release. A fair number of
projects [mainly gnome-core, gnome-utils, and gnome-applets] already
have 2.0 milestones. For those products that already have and use 2.0
milestones, I'll convert those into G2.0 milestones, so that we can have
consistency across the bugzilla.

(2) All new bugs (and hopefully within the next month all old bugs as
well) will make actual use of priorities and severities. As things stand
right now, roughly 4% of open bugs have a priority that it not 'Normal'
and only about 12% have severities that aren't 'normal' or
'enhancement.' I've updated the description of these states here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/bug_status.html#severity ; please note that in
the next day or so there will be an 'Immediate' priority for bugs that
block development- i.e., compilation bugs.

(3) All possible Immediate/Urgent bugs should be fixed or in some other
way dealt with/retriaged before each GNOME2 release, and all
Critical/Blocker bugs should be fixed as well. Ideally, all 'High'
priority bugs would also be fixed for the final release. Obviously, I do
not have the authority to block or stop a release, so I can't make these
stick, but I can help in tracking them so that the release team can work
with maintainers to get them dealt with.

So, that's where things stand. This is not a perfect plan; I'm flexible
on the details, both in the general outline and in the specifics that
will vary from product to product. But it will happen, and hopefully
(with the cooperation of the folks who actually /fix/ the bugs :) it'll
make gnome2 a much better piece of software.

Luis