the bug team and gnome2.2

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

So... as some of you may have heard, I'm still going to be doing gnome
bugs for GNOME2.2. I might not be doing that after GNOME2.2, though[1].
And frankly I spend too many hours doing this already. :) So... that
means the bug team needs to think a bit about organization and the
future. Really, it means we need to be a team :) 

Before I go further into that, I want to thank a few people- Heath
Harrelson, John Fleck, Wayne Schultz, Dave Bordoley, Ben Frantzdale,
Kjartan Maraas, Vincent Untz, Andrew Sobala, Christian Schaller- they've
all closed more than 200 bugs in the past eight months. Without them
gnome2.0 probably wouldn't have gone out in one piece. Lots of other
people helped out too, of course, to the tune of less than 200 bugs a
piece, but that still adds up to a whole lot of bugs- something like
24,000 bugs have been closed in bugzilla in the past 8 months.

So how are we going to go forward for the next 8 months? Besides the
obvious ('Luis needs to delegate more and be more consistent asking for
volunteers for bug-days and be less verbose on public mailing lists')...
my thoughts (and I'm sick of just pronouncing this type of stuff, so
I'll be very brief and let discussion go):

*just as each package has a maintainer, each package should have a QA
person, or a QA team, much like nautilus (at least theoretically) has
ATM. Yaneti is the Galeon Guy, Kjartan is the GNOME1.4 core guy... we
need more guys (and gals!) who can identify with and claim their own QA
apps and build a relationship with the code maintainers.

*triaged keyword needs to stop meaning 'luis looked at and triaged it'
and start meaning 'members of the QA team looked at it and triaged it.'
How do we do that sanely, so that we aren't duplicating each other's
work all the time? Also, we have to do this while maintaining
consistency- how is that going to work?

*obviously, we need more bodies- bugdays need to be more communal, and
maybe we need to think about having a few of them later in the evenings
(for americans) or even on weekends. And of course any other ideas about
how to bring people in are good.

I think those are the very big-picture issues we've got to think about
and resolve over the next 4-6 months. And I mean the 'we' part- yeah,
I've run the show, but lots of you have done the heavy lifting, and most
of you are pretty bright ;) so it's about time I shut up and let other
people suggest what they think would work.

Thanks ahead of time for the next round of great work, and thanks
(belatedly) for the incredible work many of you did to get GNOME2.0 out
the door-
Luis







[1]Almost certainly won't... it's honestly burning me out pretty fast.
And my SO /is/ coming back from Africa at some point ;)