Re: bugzilla abuse

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Tim Janik <timj gtk org> writes:
> 
> you recently submitted a bunch of bogus gobject bugs to bugzilla.

And a bunch of TreeView bugs, and a bunch of text widget bugs, and a
bunch of other bugs. Owen is also filing them, and Alex dumped his
complete framebuffer known bugs and TODO list in there. I also dumped
Jonathan's TreeView TODO list in there.

The point is to get all possible issues tracked for the 2.0
release. If we decide things are not issues, then we close the
bug. Bugs are *POSSIBLE* issues that must be resolved before
release. Resolution can be "NOTABUG", of course, if it turns out to be
a non-bug.

> 1) bugzilla is _not_ a development mailing list replacement, a couple
>    of your bugs are convenience or "could be done differently" items,
>    those need proper discussion on gtk-devel instead of being submitted
>    to a bugtracker where they'll sit without getting the investigation/
>    comments from the comunity they deserve

Well, if you like I can send a mail here for all 100-something bugs;
surely lots of them need discussion. I don't have a problem with that.

However I think the discussion is best had when someone starts working
on the bug, thinks through the issues, and then posts a summary with
their proposed solution to the list. e.g. yesterday I started on the
bug "move signals into GtkTreeModel interface" and thus posted the
mail about class_init() on interfaces for discussion, because that was
an issue that came up when working on the bug.

Anyhow, I am just throwing them in bugzilla so they won't get
forgotten. If resolving the bug requires a discussion, then there's no
problem with that. Let's have the discussion.

> 2) some of your bugs had already been adressed in previous threads, bugzilla
>    is not your personal wishlist bag for "i still want things the xxx way done"
>    things

Many of those bugs are things that I at least asked Owen about
beforehand, or sometimes Jonathan or others, so they are all issues
that can't be considered finally resolved and need discussion. That's
all. If you consider some of them already discussed and closed issues,
then I don't know which ones; and I have no way of knowing which
ones. You have to tell us what the hell is going on. We are not over
here receiving Tim brain waves from Germany via ESP.

A bug means "this is a possible issue we aren't sure is resolved."
It's not some kind of personal insult... just a request to be sure
everyone is happy the issue is resolved. There are a ton of bugs
applying to everyone's code, not just GObject. So you should not take
this personally or anything.

> 3) it doesn't help any to submit things as bug reports just because they're
>    currently being worked on but haven't ended up in CVS yet

Yes it does. We need to know which issues are outstanding. Otherwise
we don't know when we are finished or what needs doing. The rest of us
have no idea what is on your hard drive. Bugs are fixed when the code
is in CVS, not before; because the point of tracking issues is to be
sure everything makes it into the final release.

You should perhaps think of bugzilla as an "issue tracker" not a bug
tracker.

> last but not least, i personally am not going to use bugzilla seriously
> anyways, until there's a decent and functionally equivalent email interface
> to it. maintenance where every bug evaluation or commenting thereof
> requires me to be online is simply not an option.
> 

You can proxy through me and Owen or gtk-devel-list, I'm happy to
close bugs or add links to gtk-devel-list posts in the comment section
on your behalf. i.e. if you just tell us what is going on, we are
using bugzilla daily to keep track of what's going on, so we can make
bugzilla reflect what you tell us.

We need to track these issues and make sure they are
discussed/resolved before release. If you don't want to do it through
bugzilla, then OK, but someone has to track them somehow. So post your
stuff on gtk-devel-list or to Owen privately or whatever, and we'll
keep it in sync with bugzilla.

Or if you want me to send a mail for every gobject bug to this list,
just say the word, I am happy to do that.

i.e. basically you can ignore bugzilla if you want. But the rest of us
do need to track gobject-related issues because we need to know the
status of that.

Havoc