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

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 23:23, Wayne Schuller wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 02:32, Luis Villa wrote:
> > 1.2 is, AFAIK, not supported by anyone, either pragmatically or as part
> > of policy.
> 
> Well 1.4 is backward compatible with it so I lump them together.

My point is that the bugs reported in 1.2 (from binaries that are now
/two/ years old) are /not/ backwards compatible in any way. They're not
only not supported they're never, ever useful traces.

> No, consider my example. Imagine if a large enough people were using
> gnome 1.4 that some of them starting submitting patches or new
> translations. Do we want to make them take gnome 1.4 development to a
> different bugzilla or cvs server?

No, no, no. I never said 'translators and 1.4 hackers shouldn't use
bugzilla.' I said, very specifically,  'very old bug-buddies should not
function.' The leap between the two of those is /vast/.

What I want is for mindless users to not get a popup saying 'submit a
bug.' If they want to fix it, force them to get out gdb and learn to use
it- don't clutter things up with hundreds of useless reports of things
either fixed for months or already very known.

> Every new generation will leave behind a large group of people who are
> slow to migrate. We need to have an infrastructure that can scale to
> serve both.

Yes. Preventing the submission of very, very old and very useless
bug-buddy reports has very, very little to do with that.

> Basically we need: 
> 	a) a bugzilla infrastructure where people can report/triage on
> different generation platforms without bothering each other (and a
> bug-buddy that does a reasonable job of sending things to the right
> place). luckily we already have a good cvs structure for hacking
> multiple platforms at once.

We're working on the bugzilla end of this, but it may require more
resources than we'll have in the foreseeable future- bugzilla just
wasn't designed for this.

> 	b) to produce better software. the problem would by a large go away if
> we did not have the gnome-panel and libzvt crashes in gnome 1.4. Our
> processes have improved greatly and I doubt such weaknesses will not go
> unnoticed in gnome 2.0 and future platforms.
> 
> I will stop complaining soon about gnome 1.4 support, I will just submit
> to whatever decisions are made, even if it involves blocking old
> reports.

I don't want to block all old reports. Just very old bug-buddies.

> But I just want to help the gnome project infrastructure scale properly.

We definitely all want to do this.

Luis