Re: some bugs

[Wayne Schuller <k_wayne linuxpower org>]

hi all,

On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 20:34, Chris Chabot wrote:
> In a lot of cases, the product in question has changed to often in 
> various new releases the bug entries are no longer relevant, and in 
> other cases, the bug keeps its open status indefinatly without anyone 
> leaving comments, asking questions or closing the bug..

You need to give it time.
 
> To often i get to close my own bugs, since the report is no longer 
> relevant over time, without anyone ever looking at the bug.

You need to give it time.
 
> Admitedly some maintainers are very responsive and make good use of 
> bugzilla, and it is a pleasure to try to help them solve problems, but 
> to often i get the feeling the bug reporting could be in vain.
> 
> Is there something we (bug reporters) could do to make bugzilla more 
> usable and more populair with the maintainers?
> 
> What i am worried about is that if a situation like i described above is 
> allowed to exist for to long, it will turn into a self forfilling 
> prophesy. So many non relevant bug reports, that a developer can not 
> find any usefull information, and so little developer activity that no 
> one wants to report bugs any more.

Relying on maintainers to give bugzilla love is only one part of the
solution.

Another part is that we are attempting to train a bigger team of
bugzilla hunters whose contribution to Gnome is to simply go around
looking at old reports, checking if bugs have been fixed, marking
duplicates etc. 

This group (the gnome bug-squad if you like) will help make the masses
of reports on bugzilla more readable, organised and useful for the
maintainers.

Remember we never remove reports without a very good reason. So they
will eventually get handled by the gnome bugsquad.

Building the gnome bug-squad (kind of like bugzilla janitors) is
essential to helping the Gnome project scale to the huge size it is
becoming (hundreds of reports submitted each week). 

One of the reasons I wanted to get bug stats into the gnome weekly
summary was to raise the profile of people who bug hunt - plus it's a
great and easy way to contribute to gnome.

So don't worry about bugzilla reports that just seem to do nothing, we
will make sure they haunt the maintainers eventually. As Luis always
says, the bad bugs will keep coming back time and time again.

You just need to give it time.

thanks,
Wayne