Re: making maint aliases work better.

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

So, this basically sounds like a good idea. Two caveats (the first of
which is the reason why I sort of filed this and never responded, sorry,
jamesh):

*This makes it very hard to figure out who is actually maintaining
anything in bugzilla. I'd like to have a page building such a list
before we switch, and I don't have time to write it ATM.

*whoever writes that page should also look at auto-adding the
'following' stuff. Currently, to make this work, we'd either have to ask
the maintainers to do it themselves (which is unreliable at best :) or
peek into someone's password file and log in as them, once for each
address in the file. So, I'd much prefer if someone scripted this up
quickly (shouldn't be too big a deal to do, really) and then I or one of
the other people with SQL access could run the script.

Thanks again for thinking this through, James-
Luis

On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 04:44, James Henstridge wrote:
> 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.