Is bugzilla worth keeping?

[Robert Shearman]

Mike Hearn wrote:

>One thing I notice about most other open source projects is that they
>have many more flamewars than we do. So, I thought I'd start one:
>  
>

:)

>It strikes me, looking at the wine-bugs list, that there is a huge
>disparity between the number of people maintaining it and the number
>of people filing bugs in it. It seems to be quite rare for
>communication on bugfixes to take place there, wine-devel is the more
>usual forum.
>  
>

I have been thinking the same thing. The trouble Wine has versus other 
projects is that useful bug reports are very rare. This isn't really the 
fault of the people entering bugs into the database, but can be broken 
down into four factors:
1. Unlike other projects, we rarely have access to the source code to 
find out what the program is doing.
2. The people entering bugs aren't always developers and don't always 
have the skills to provide a good bug report.
3. A lot of Wine's code doesn't have a "maintainer". Without someone 
caring about a particular area or knowledgable about the code there is 
often no incentive to fix bugs.
4. There are a huge number of possible combinations of Wine's 
configuration, ranging from Windows version to builtin versus native 
DLLs to DLLs from different versions of Windows.

>So are we misleading users by having a bugzilla into thinking that if
>they file a bug there, it'll be fixed when it probably won't?
>  
>

Yes, we are most of the time.

>If so, does it matter?
>  
>

Bugzilla is a useful tool. When it becomes clogged up with bugs that no 
one is going to fix, this lessens it usefulness.

>If we were to simply drop bugzilla, how would it impact the project?
>  
>

There are many useful bugs/task lists currently in bugzilla and I 
believe it would harm the project to just drop Bugzilla. However, by 
changing the usage of bugzilla we could make it more useful again. 
Perhaps someone needs to go through bugzilla requesting more information 
and assigning bugs to the correct components, or perhaps we need to put 
a big message on the front page of it saying something like "only for 
specific problems - we can't help you if you just say that program X 
doesn't work"

Rob