Re: Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Wed, 07 Feb 2001 13:19:38 +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:

>Now, how am I supposed to work out and find where the bug reports are ?
>More generally how should we process bug report on a large scale ?
>Debian is unlikely to be the only case, I can see Ximian, Sun, Eazel,
>Red Hat getting bug reports though their own custommer support. Should we
>manage this flow ? How ? We can try to import bugs but that may get
>fastidious (think about the 100+ various Linux distro, not all have bugs
>reporting mechanism with possible Gnome entries but trying anything
>extensive won't work !)

I would assume it is the packagers'/distributions' jobs to pass 
relevant bugs upstream, i.e. to the GNOME Bug Tracker.  Hopefully 
even with some filtering, so that they pass one copy of a particular 
bug and mark the others as duplicates in their system.  (An 
incidental benefit is that if the package maintainer gets listed as 
the contact on the GNOME bug report, there may be a higher 
probability that the fix will propagate quickly back into the 
distribution.)  

I know that I occasionally get gnome-pim bug reports passed on from 
the RH bugtracker; I'm proud to say that my two hour response time is 
noted in their system as well. :)

Of course, I don't know if that is their systematic policy, or it's 
just a function of Havoc moving some bugs to the right system.

>We can certainly discuss with the members of the foundation on importing
>their related bugs but clearly the right way to do this is to get the
>pointers right (bug-buddy being the systematic approach).

This is definitely something where we should poll the Advisory Board
and get some input--- the distribution and hardware OEM's probably
have the most experience handling the bug flow, and it would be useful
to know what their respective policies on GNOME bugs are.  If we can
convince them to adopt a uniform policy which works for us as well, so
much the better.

-Russell




-- 
Russell Steinthal		Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<rms39 columbia edu>		Columbia College, Class of 1999
<steintr nj org>		UNIX System Administrator, nj.org