Re: obscure bugs

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 09:21:15AM -0700 or thereabouts, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> On 24 Jun 2001 11:52:42 +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 08:22:40AM -0600 or thereabouts, John Fleck
> wrote:
> > > Is it reasonable to just mark these "INCOMPLETE" and be done with
> > > them, or is there some value in saving them and putting them
> > > somewhere, and if so, where?
> > 
> > I have wondered about this. I started off by making great duplicate
> > chains of them. But then I realised that every time you do that, 
> > all the people who own other bugs in the same duplicate chain get
> > email too. 
> 
> I'm all for making the duplicate chains.  If somebody decides to look at
> fixing these bugs, we want them to be able to find all of the
> information that we have, with a minimum of hunting.  If we don't mark
> duplicates, then there's no chance that they'll be able to find all of
> the information, nor even most of it.  

Yes, I agree. Hence my uncertainty. The two patterns I mentioned, I
got people to look at and confirm they were useless. You couldn't
even say "well, it shows lots of people are using this program"
because it didn't even give clues to what crashed. 

Others, I'm less cavalier with.

> Oh, one note...  If you change a bug with 30 dupes, 30 emails are sent
> out, but only 1 email per person.  Hopefully if you get a line of dupes
> that long, somebody will consider it an important bug to fix...

We can hope :) 
 
> I wonder how other people are going about bug hacking.  When I did
> gnome-games a couple of months ago, I first went and moved everything I
> could figure out from general into the right games categories.  Once
> they were there, I picked 1 game, and looked at every bug, from oldest
> to newest.  There were a lot of dupes, and I marked them as such.  I

Yes. I start by sorting. Then pick a component and start marking 
duplicates and NEEDINFOs. I have not done a lot more than that. I've
mostly been trying to get all the "general" component bugs in
gnome-core and gnome-applets into the right components, leaving
only build and similar errors in the general component for each.

I can't fix most of them myself. But I shall try to verify they
still exist and then post a summary of applets/number of bugs and some 
that look simple enough to be reasonable bite-sized chunks (as
determined by my non-hacking "well, it -looks- small" brain) to
the gnome-love list when they are sorted.

Then I am going to shift over to gnome-terminal bugs soon, because I
was doing that when the old tracker went down, and I see patterns
there, and a couple of people have expressed interest in getting
the gnome-terminal bugs sorted. (Malcolm Tredinnick, Sander Vesic, 
and Anthony Taranto (probably misspelled, voltron on #gnome). I
dunno whether they were serious, but there's only one way to find
out :)

Telsa