Re: keyword cleanup

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 12:45:36 -0500, Luis Villa <louie novell com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 11:46 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > I'd like to nuke some keywords in the ongoing quest to keep things 'clean'.
> 
> Update on this:
> 
> Still there; I still have open questions about the querying and use of
> these that I'd like to investigate more:
> 
> > * HELPWANTED: doesn't make much sense to me, but appears to be more
> > widely used- perhaps someone should review the open ones to see how they
> > are used in the wild?

I finally got around to doing this (it helps that I modified my
easy-fix.cgi query to allow other keywords --
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/easy-fix.cgi?keyword=HELPWANTED). 
There are lots of different uses of this keyword:

  1) The maintainer has no clue how to fix it
  2) The maintainer can't duplicate because they don't have access to the
     hardware/software that reporter does; someone else needs to investigate.
  3) Maintainers need help from a specialist of some sort (e.g. auto-fu)
  4) Maintainers don't want to spend the time on this, but would accept patches.
  5) Users found a replacement for the voting system to get people to
look at their
     bugs.
  6) Users are hoping someone will provide a workaround for the bug that is
     affecting them.
  7) Someone is trying to contribute but hasn't been able to figure
out how to fix
     the bug and wants hints from the maintainer.

I don't think HELPWANTED is something that is very helpful; and in
some cases it's even harmful.  Addressing the above cases:

  1) Who is going to search for bugs to fix by looking for things that
maintainers
     weren't able to do? When I see Owen say he doesn't know how to fix
     something, I sure don't want to spend my time on it (unless it
affects me--but
     then I don't need a keyword).
  2) Why would someone who is running on AIX that can help fix porting bugs be
     searching for bugs on that architecture using the HELPWANTED keyword?
     There's just not that many...
  3) auto-fu and other specialists aren't going to be searching for
things with the
     HELPWANTED keyword either, especially given its use for so many other
     things.
  4) I think we should rename the easy-fix keyword to get it to incorporate some
      of these cases
  5&6) This appears to be abuse from our angle, but the description of the
     keyword in nowise makes this clear and actually could appear to be a
     legitimate use to users.
  7) I can't possibly see how this keyword helps here; maintainers should be
     reading bug reports for their module, and aren't likely to think
of this use and
     thus aren't likely to query on it.

I think the noise from the many different uses is making this keyword
useless; and also that it's doing damage for what would appear to be
useful cases like (2) & (3)--having the keyword there implies that
someone is searching on that keyword and may help.  If we remove the
keyword, the maintainers will probably be more likely to try to find
the right people to cc so that the bug can be handled.

Anyway, those are my (probably overly verbose) thoughts.

Elijah