bugs [was Re: 11 Questions to answer]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 11:18, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 07:26:52AM -0800, Jim Gettys hp com wrote: 
> > My opinion is that things can't/won't change there unless/until the
> > overall community both makes it clear the current situation is a major
> > problem, *and* is able/willing to volunteer the effort to keep such
> > a bugzilla system an advantage rather than a liability.  There has
> > been some on the former (lots of grousing, by me, and others),
> > but so far, we don't have committment by people
> > able and willing to spend the time on the triage end.
> > 
> > Without such triage and management of the bugzilla on an ongoing basis,
> > I think the XFree86 core team's current consensus is probably correct.
> > 
> > So if people are willing to volunteer to do this work, please let me know;
> > I'd like to remove objections to progress in this area.
> 
> Seems there's a bit of chicken-and-egg there; for gnome.org we do have
> an amazing number of triage volunteers that are hugely helpful (I know
> because I'm also responsible for part of redhat.com bugzilla where I
> have no volunteers and am thus significantly more doomed and spend a
> whole lot more time on it), but you have to create the bugzilla and
> get people involved (e.g. via Luis's bug days) *before* you can have
> triagers, you won't have triagers from day one. 

Well, you /can/ have a triager from day one, if they know the territory
and are talked to about it beforehand. IMHO, you have to have /someone/
ready to do the job at least on a volunteer basis before setting up a
large bugzilla makes much sense at all. At least at first, things will
be fairly low volume anyway (how long did we have to fight before 'put
it in bugzilla' became a stock response?)

> Also you have to be sure people avoid, say, flaming the triagers. ;-)
>  But hopefully that's straightforward.

One would think. :) It helps a lot when triagers are knowledgeable. I'd
have volunteered to help out bugzilla.kernel.org if I had fuck-all of
clue about the kernel, but I don't, which would have meant a hell of a
learning curve.

> For a long time gnome.org didn't have triagers because Luis wasn't
> recruiting and teaching people how; but I think mozilla.org has always
> had lots of them.

mozilla.org has had a full-time bug guy since more or less day one, who
organized their initial bug days and the like. He's my hero/role model.
:) 

> Maybe we could donate part of our Thursday bug days to XFree ;-)

Over my flamed, dead body. :) They wouldn't be of much good, anyway-
except for duplicate hunting (which I doubt b.xfree.org would get too
many of) they'd lack the domain-specific knowledge that I'm trying
desperately[1] to imbue them with. 

Luis

[1]And which many of them are quickly picking up, despite all the
complexity.