Re: Bugzilla and the Great Quest for the Query -> maintaining old software

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Hey there,

> bugzilla isn't just for maintaining the most recent platform.

I agree...but when bugzilla becomes unusable because it has a large
amount of duplications, bad reports, old reports for software that isn't
being maintained/hacked up/released then you have a problem. 

I wasn't around for GNOME 1.2, but it seems you get to a stage where you
have to close a bug and say 'please update your version of GNOME'. You
right, this isn't often all that desirable, but if we really want to
have an efficient bug system we need to keep it clean.

> It would be very bad to remove large amounts of 1.4 reports simply
> because it is 'the old platform'. Many of us depend on that platform
> (both personally and professionally) and we will do the work to fix bugs
> and maintain the software.

I'm not saying remove them all by some SQL query without looking at
them. Only today, I went through all the gnome-utils bug reports and
categorized them into GNOME1.4 and GNOME2.0 - ie. if I saw a particular
report that looked as if it could apply to GNOME2.0, I marked it as
such.

> Maybe we need a general gnome 1.4 maintenance team, so we have people
> who are interested in this type of stuff, and so it isn't just kjartan.
> I would be willing to be on this team.

I personally find it hard to believe there will be too many people
wanting to volunteer for this - but hey, call me a cynic ;) The real
problem, as we were talking on IRC earlier, is that there is bad
communication with the various distributions that are shipping GNOME. If
we could get more people sending patches upstream into the various
stable branches perhaps this would work better. For GNOME 1.4 it didn't.

> Contrary to popular belief kjartan isn't the only fixing bugs and doing
> work on gnome 1.4. Though his work alone has been fantastic.

Yes, I realize this..but how long are these people willing to stay
fixing bugs for 1.4? We'll soon see I guess ;)


				See ya,
					Glynn ;)