An interesting idea?!

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Just stumbled across this bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla:

	http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114760

The summary is "Bugs not planning to be worked on need to be clarified
for other developers" and the initial description is

	"There are a thousand unfixed bugs in Bugzilla that no one is
	planning to fix that don't have any information on:
	A) What we want if this is implemented
	B) A skeleton of what needs to be done to implement

	Knowledgeable people that don't have time to implement a bug
	(especially bug owners) could at least provide some kind of data
	on what needs to be done to implement it ON THE BUGZILLA SYSTEM
	in a place where someone who has time and is looking for
	something to do but might not know where to start can get
	started.  That is within the bug. I think we should add to all
	the bugs that don't have enough information so someone can
	weight whether or not they can implement it and not enough
	information to get started so that people who have the time but
	maybe not the expertise of some seasoned developers can get
	started on bugfixing."

It strikes me that this is not a completely insane idea (although it has
utterly failed within Mozilla) and wondered what other people thought
about it.

The idea has two parts: effect and administration.

The effect we want is that for bugs which are not likely to be attended
to very rapidly, somebody with the appropriate knowledge should drop in
a quick description of what needs to be done to help solve the bug. This
could be requirements gathering, or it could be some coding guidelines.
Anything helpful would be good.

The administration part is that we would need to chase up such
knowledgeable people for sufficiently old and neglected bugs. I think the
idea in Mozilla was that the above bug would be used to track bugs which
needed somebody to fill in information. With the judicious application
of a keyword (something like "progress", to make up a bad example), it
would then be relatively simple to search for all bugs containing such
forward-looking hints.

Now, here's the reason this might not work: developer's may resist the
idea implicitly on the grounds that they do not have time to consider the
bug in depth. If they did have time, they would just fix it. In some
case (e.g. Nautilus) it may be difficult to find the right person to put
in some information. If somebody volunteered, that would be good; but if
we needed to try and hunt down the responsible party, it could be very
difficult.

We already have a problem within GNOME that it is difficult to maintain
a list of things for people to work on. And we get requests often enough
from people who are looking for something to do. This may be a way to
solve that problem.

Am I completely crazy, or is this worth thinking about? I am kind of
floating the balloon here before taking this a wider audience on
gnome-hackers.

Malcolm
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