Re: Bugzilla for GNOME is ready for Beta test

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org> writes:

> will lashell net writes:
> 
> > Why not just bugs.gnome.org? Its going to replace the old system.
> 
> Well, as long as bugs.gnome.org exists we can't use that name.
> 
> > > So what's now left to do is:
> > > 
> > > 1.) Customize the whole thing (replace the Mozilla logo with the
> > >GNOME logo etc.) and write a nice document on how to report bugs.
> > > 
> > > 2.) Report some bugs so we can tweak the configuration a bit (create
> > >products, components, keywords etc.)
> > 
> > I would think that using each module as a product would be
> > useful. This is one of the better correlations I think.
> > 
> > > 3.) Loop over bugs.gnome.org and migrate all bugs from it.
> > 
> > This is extremely important and really really needs to be done. I know
> > a lot of people think that we should just dump all the old bugs, but
> > this would really be a mistake. If we could programatically just
> > import all the old ones, and the maintainers go through them this
> > would be a much better decision.
> 
> Why do we need to put all this crap into Bugzilla just to directly remove
> 99.99% of it immediately ?
> 
> It's much better to just keep the old bug tracker alive for some weeks
> (while it is already rejecting new bugs) and give the maintainers time to
> resubmit the good ones. And if they don't care, we can assume there's
> nothing valuable in that module and just dump all bugs.

If at all possible we must import all open and closed bugs from the
old bug tracker into the new bug tracker with the same bug numbers.

Yes, we'll get lots of useless junk, but that's simply not the point.

The point is:

 - There are lots and lots of open legitimate bugs that are actually 
   legitimate.
 
 - Bugs reoccur, even after they've been thought to have dealt
   with. 

 - Being able to look up old bug reports is essential for interpreting
   ChangeLog entries such as:

Sun Jan 30 20:10:52 2000  Lars Hamann  <lars gtk org>

	A few more fixes for bug #5487, #2051, #2677.
	* gtk/gtkclist.c : 

   [...]

If you wanted to dump certain categories of closed bugs (netscape
crashes, people wondering what this bug-buddy thing is, and so
forth...) that might be OK. But the default action needs to be
keep, not discard.

                                        Owen