Re: Danger: older bugs are getting squashed with NEEDINFO

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

Hi Tristan,

Am Freitag, den 18.09.2009, 14:16 -0400 schrieb Tristan Van Berkom:
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net> wrote:
> > Am Donnerstag, den 17.09.2009, 15:26 -0400 schrieb Tristan Van Berkom:
> >> So the bottom line is basically this: if you feel this should
> >> be the minimum standard of attention that a maintainer must
> >> absolutely pay to his buglist, then so be it, but I think you are
> >> being unfair to ask this of me.
> >
> > Yes, I expect maintainers should be able to take a look at the incoming
> > bug reports at least once in 12 months.
> > That is all what this policy is about.
> > Nothing else.
> 
> I am seriously and sadly insulted now.

That was not the intention.
I'm sorry and wonder which of my words insulted you.

> Lets recap:
>   - There was no effort made at all to contact me about this policy change

Absolutely valid criticism, and that's why it's good to have this thread
now.
We (bugsquad) underestimated that the initial policy would have such a
negative outcome for some maintainers.
Hence we've changed the policy to only apply to bugs in UNCONFIRMED
state that have not been touched for a year.

So from my personal point of view I'd define that "minimum standard of
attention" to bug reports as "once in a year".
Other opinions welcome.

>   - The policy change you are making directly involves me doing lots
> of work now:
>        going over hundreds of entries in the buglist one by one, waiting for
>        bugzilla.gnome.org to resolve, and manually "claim" bugs that I
> am interested
>        in keeping.

I'm unsure what "claim" means here. If it means "confirming by changing
the status from UNCONFIRMED to NEW": yes.

glade3 currently has 212 tickets in UNCONFIRMED state. Of these tickets,
70 have not been touched for more than one year[1].
So "hundreds of entries" are currently 70 for glade3.

>   - It also means that receiving bugmail is not good enough, I must from now on
>     always visit bugzilla.gnome.org and resolve the page to claim the bug, after
>     having coffee and reading my morning bugmail, and just before I
> hurry out the door.

If you replace "always" by "once in a year" this is a correct statement.

> And if this weren't enough, now you are telling me that this policy is all about
> me not doing enough work for GNOME, Nothing else.

I never used words like "not doing enough for GNOME" here. There was no
intention to imply this, or to imply, in any way, "not enough work done
for GNOME".

> To tell you the truth its gotten so bad this year that sometimes I just dont
> want to look at the bugmail, for fear of another user telling me:
>    "how dare you release 3.6 at all if its not perfect, you must fix it for
>     me immediately or I will declare your work a waste of time".

I think we've all made our bad experiences with people that
misunderstand open-source culture as "You work for free but you must fix
this for me because it's the most important bug in the world and I am
always right". For worse cases we also have a Code of Conduct in
place[2]. But of course it's also one of GNOME's aim to ship stable
software without any big flaws included.
I consider the "or I will declare your work a waste of time" part as
offending/insulting.

> I need to know that we are together in GNOME, we are supposed to be a team;
> please dont tell me that my work is not welcome.

Nobody ever stated this.
Everybody's work is welcome in GNOME. It is the Bugsquad's intention to
work in consensus with all of GNOME and it always has been.
We are sorry on *not* having communicated with the rest of GNOME about
this change, but we believed that all developers subscribed to bugs.
We would very much like to know which other mailing lists we should add
on.


So to summarize, the question boils down to:
Are you able to take a look at the latest glade3 bug reports once a
year? If not, glade3 probably has to be excluded from the policy.

And do other maintainers totally or partially share Tristan's criticism?

As already said, the GNOME Bugsquad is highly interested in feedback, as
it exists to help developers and maintainers to do their jobs (by trying
to find a good compromise between avoiding creating more work than
necessary for developers and avoiding having a database with lots of
outdated ancient bugs).

andre (with a big Thanks to C de-Avillez)

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?chfieldto=-365d&chfieldfrom=-5000d&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&product=glade3
[2] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct
-- 
 mailto:ak-47 gmx net | failed
 http://www.iomc.de/  | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper