TODO stuff

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

So, I've been bullied^H^H^H^H^H asked to reply to the TODO list posted
to gnome-bugsquad while I was away. Unfortunately since I had mail
disabled, I can't reply to the thread. The mail I'm replying to is here:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-bugsquad/2004-August/msg00000.html

I'm also Cc-ing the brand spanking new bugzilla-devel-list, which is
where a lot of this should be discussed ;) [ Subliminal message:
subscribe if you're interested in this sort of thing. Don't if you're
not. ]

* Having a TODO webpage

Yup, sounds reasonable, the alternative to this is to log things in
bugzilla. I like bugzilla because it's easy to add and remove things
from it, in contrast to a webpage. We already have some of this sort of
thing in bug form against the bugzilla product.

As a side note, if someone wants to go through all the issues Elijah,
Olav and possibly others raised and put them in bugs, that would be imho
worthwhile.

* Maintainer documentation

The "old way" of doing -maint aliases (halloween) is totally dead. If
anyone tries to use maint-aliases.txt, it won't work. We need to update
that part of the webpage.

Common question is "How do I add versions" (etc) (answer: email
bugmaster). Oh, that leads onto a new TODO: integrate adding bugzilla
versions with install-module.pl on master.gnome.org .....

* Conditional milestone

Nod, there is an "isgnome" field in the DB exactly for this sort of
thing.

* NEEDINFO hard to work with

Changes here would be lovely. Maybe we should look at getting our
NEEDINFO stuff in upstream, actually - it would be one less prong on our
fork. The changes proposed are a bit more than simple template editing,
but are totally reasonable.

* Olav's triage mode

This sounds like an excellent idea. I mean, really fantastic. Next time
I have time, which could be a while, I might work on it.

* X-Bugzilla-Reason

Comments in bug 139173

* The general product

I think the point of the general product is so people can do silly
things like create a bug depending on lots of cross-product bugs to
track, to make up an example here, HAL integration into the desktop. But
it's been abused by accumulating loads of cruft. So there are no
maintainers because people would only be interested in a specific bug,
not the whole product.

That situation could be changed, but why would you want to watch bugs in
the "general" product?

* An "I don't know" product.

Hmmmmmmmm. Interesting idea, so long as it doesn't get flooded with
loads of people who can't be bothered to find the correct product (which
I suspect might happen) instead of genuinely not knowing. Also loads of
incorrectly filed bugs in acme should happen less now that bug-buddy is
really quite intelligent about choosing sensible defaults. Worth talking
about, I think.

Stuff I didn't reply to was a "Nod, agree." But for each bugzilla patch,
think about if this is something we could get upstream. We can also
apply it locally to get our fixes in use fast, but making our code delta
larger is painful.

--
Andrew