New metabugs

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 08:47, hatky wrote:
> Ok, with you permission I like to get this subject
> changed a bit to clearing bugzilla.
> 
> I noticed there are plenty of bugs and little activity
> on any of then many of them look outdated.

Yeah, this is a problem for all bugzillas. About a month or two ago a
few of us went through and cleaned some out. Needs doing more often
really though.

> So I would like Step One to be getting all the bugs
> that there last comment was before 6 months or more
> commented as please test it again or we will close it
> in the next 30.

This sounds like a good idea. We've done it before, but it takes time to
track them all.

> I really hope you agree with me about that becouse
> with so many open bug I think most developer DO NOT
> want to trak the bugzilla any more...

Well, I know I mostly go by the wine-bugs mailing list, but it does make
bugs easy to forget about. Remember though that often people just don't
know the answer.....

> Secound Step I would want to do is getting the bugs
> into some categories so it will be easy for developer
> to track the bugs that intrest them 

This idea I'm not so sure about. If somebody is interested in working on
games, then they can fire up games they actually own and start fixing
bugs. Unfortunately Wine is not yet at the stage where people find it
hard to locate bugs :(

> btw just to understend this is a meta bug of getting
> game x to work and under it all the uniplemented
> or/and broken stuff ok?

I think these things are better done when somebody with drive says "I'm
going to make game X work" and then goes ahead and solves them all - the
chances of finding 2 or 3 people all with that game and all with that
drive/level of skill is fairly rare, they all work on different games.

> The last step (and an importent one) would be to try
> keep the traking a live by insreting both developers
> and users to look at them and keep updating them.

If nobody knows what causes a bug, or the bug is "implement feature X"
then no amount of tracking will get the work done quicker. It basically
boils down to a terminal lack of manpower.

> Do you agree with anything I said so far or am I just
> talking newbee crap?

It's good you're thinking about these things, but experience with
bugzillas tells me that especially for a project like Wine, while it can
be very useful to track odd bugs/regressions etc, for more general
things it's not so useful.

thanks -mike

-- 
Mike Hearn <m.hearn at signal.qinetiq.com>
QinetiQ - Malvern Technology Center