Re: whether to use bugzilla or not

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On 1/16/02 5:32 PM, "Chris Chabot" <chabotc reviewboard com> wrote:

> From my experiance these bug reports (specialy for gnome beta's) seem to get
> lost in the wind more often then not ;-) I had a fatal ORBit rpm build bug in
> bugzilla for over a year (or more, been trying gnome since the 0.20 releases),
> with quite a few comments etc for very simple to fix problems, yet i saw the
> same problem come back in every ORBit release.

I think bugzilla is the best place.

A part of the misunderstanding may be what you are expecting from the .spec
files in the tarballs. These .spec files are not really part of the packages
the way the rest of the source is. None of the Linux distributions use these
.spec files, as far as I know. They have their own .spec files (or
equivalent, depending on what packaging scheme they use). And Ximian doesn't
use them either.

So a bug in the .spec file could easily spend a much longer time in bugzilla
than a bug that actually prevents the package from being built.

In any case, the standard way to deal with this sort of thing is to file a
bugzilla report once you are sure its a bug. You can then use list mail to
start a discussion of the bug, but having the bug report in the database
makes it much easier on the maintainer, who otherwise has to be careful to
save certain email messages.

> Since i want to make sure i try to do my part in the following gnome-2.0-alpha
> & up releases, i thought maybe this was a good place to swamp with 'basic
> errors that could/should be addressed before thinking about releasing'.

We don't really expect these .spec files to be in good shape for the alpha
releases. Many of the maintainers don't actually maintain the .spec files in
the packages.

We could remove the .spec files just for clarity, but I think that might
make things even worse.

> If you think, that despite the above, bugzilla is still the best place, i'll
> gladly comply.. Are all the new library names (libbonobo vs bonobo, etc)
> already in the bugzilla.gnome.org system?

Let us know if you go to report a bug and can't find the package to report
it in.

    -- Darin