Re: random thought about bug-buddy (in the 'very long term thinking' category)

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Sun, 2002-07-07 at 00:10, Wayne Schuller wrote:
> Caveat: I always seem to take the more conservative position on
> suggestions to mass block or close old reports!

:)

> On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 11:54, Luis Villa wrote:
> > Am I on crack? Any reasons to object to this?
> 
> You are right to be in 'long-term-thinking' mode, and to be thinking
> pragmatically about what is possible for bugmasters.
> 
> I think there are several reasonable objections to this:
> 
> a) We still support the old platforms. This is the offical gnome policy.

1.2 is, AFAIK, not supported by anyone, either pragmatically or as part
of policy.

> b) These bug reports reflect the userbase of Gnome. Taking an extreme
> example: if 90% of people in July 2002 are still using gnome 1.2, then
> obviously there is big problem, but it is not with bug-buddy. 

I'd take the position that that's irrelevant: all that matters is 
1) what people are hacking on and
2) what vendors are supporting /themselves/.

> c) If there is an active userbase using an old gnome desktop, new
> bug-hunters and triagers will arise from within that community. We
> shouldn't put obstacles in front of their gnome hacking. So if anyone is
> triaging the current platform why can't they just ignore these old
> reports?

I'd argue that bug-buddy stack traces of this age are all either
duplicates or resulting from broken installations. So /if/ people are
going to suddenly rise up and give two shits about gnome 1.2, we're
doing them a favor too. (Rather, if people rise up and give two shits
about gnome2.0 in three years, we're doing /those/ people a favor.)

> d) At the end of the day, bug-buddy should be putting these old reports
> in a place that doesn't bother the people triaging the current platform.
> This is why we use a clever tool like bugzilla, right?

Hopefully :) Dave Fallon is working on adding a GNOME version field to
bugzilla; with luck, this will help this task immensely. But it is still
going to take a lot of reworking of the bugzilla infrastructure.

Also, FWIW, there is no way to make bugzilla have per-version
maintainers, and the infrastructure for that is going to be hellishly,
hellishly ugly. So most likely maintainers are going to continue to at
least get email from huge #s of old, crap installations for some time,
even if they can ignore it in queries. Maintainers, this means you
should be on my side in this discussion ;)

HTHclarify-
Luis