Let's talk about Bugzilla

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Hi all,

This is the continuation of a couple of conversations I had with GNOME
Shell developers during this year's GUADEC. I think we all agree that
the current state of the gnome-shell Bugzilla isn't great. Despite the
efforts of various people, we have a large number of unorganised bugs,
and this makes it quite difficult for contributors to know what they
should be working on.

So what do we do about the situation? I think the main thing we need
is a documented procedure for processing and triaging GNOME Shell
bugs. This would:

 * Allow us to identify the bugs that we (the development team) care about.
 * Help to deal with the bug backlog by allowing us to bulk close old bugs.
 * Provide volunteer triagers with a way to help out.

My suggestions for a bug triage procedure are pretty simple, and are
based on the standard Bugsquad guidelines [1]:

 * Bulk close bugs from over two stable releases in the past.
 * Use the NEW status to mark bugs that have been triaged and
identified as being valid (this helps triagers to know what has been
triaged and what hasn't).
 * Identify priority bugs using the target-milestone field.

I started documenting this procedure on the wiki during the final days
of GUADEC:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/BugGuidelines

If the development team can agree on this process, I think it would be
great to start using it, and to encourage people to help out with
triage.

Allan

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Bugsquad/TriageGuide/