making maint aliases work better.

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

The current scheme of maint aliases used with GNOME bugzilla has a 
number of downsides:

  1. when making a change to a bug, it is not clear who is getting
     mailed, as some addresses are hidden behind the alias
  2. If you are making changes to bugs assigned to one of your
     packages, you get notification email even if you have your
     bugzilla account set up not to spam you for such changes (because
     bugzilla doesn't know that sending mail to the -maint alias will
     send mail to you).
  3. Bug mail directed at the alias uses the settings of the -maint
     alias account, rather than your personal account's settings.
  4. CVS access is required to update who the -maint alias points at
     (not such a big issue for most aliases, but may be for some of the
     QA aliases).

I have worked out a way of setting things up with bugzilla to work 
around these issues.  Here are the steps:

  1. create a -maint alias in the
     halloween/bugzilla.gnome.org/maint-aliases.txt file in CVS.  It
     doesn't matter who it points at, as it won't receive mail from
     bugzilla.  (you could point it at /dev/null even).
  2. create a bugzilla account for the maint alias.
  3. ask someone with sufficient bugzilla perms for the password on the
     maint alias account, so you can change its settings.  Change the
     email settings for account to "Only those bugs I am listed on the
     CC line", which will prevent the account from receiving mail for
     bugs assigned to it.  You also seem to need "new email tech"
     turned off, otherwise it gets mail regardless.
  4. Log back into bugzilla with your account, and make sure "new email
     tech" is turned on.
  5. Add the maint alias to the list of users you are watching.
  6. Make the maint alias the default owner of the appropriate components.

That should be it.  When a bug owned by the maint alias is 
created/changed, it won't receive email directly but all the people 
watching the maint alias will.  The person who made the change will see 
the complete list of people getting bug mail.  Maintainers won't get bug 
spam for changes they make through the alias.  And anyone can easily add 
themseleves to the notification lists through the bugzilla preferences 
pages.

How does this sound?

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au   http://linux.conf.au/
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ | Jan 22-25   Perth, Western Australia.