Bugzilla: A Call to Arms

Tony Lambregts tony_lambregts at telusplanet.net
Mon Apr 29 22:24:06 CDT 2002


Andriy Palamarchuk wrote:

>We already had discussion on wine-devel about
>importance of polishing Wine, making a set of
>applications to work very well.
>
>Cruicial in this process is prioritizing of the
>issues, work distribution between developers. The
>companies already have internal testing and bug fixing
>process.
>
>Of course, each company has their own product-specific
>work, but most of the problems are general for Wine.
>I suggest to share this work more actively using
>Bugzilla.
>
>Recently there was some work done in cleaning the
>issues database and it is in pretty much usable
>condition.
>
>To start using bugzilla more actively I suggest
>following steps:
>1) define subsystem/direction owners. The owners will
>get their system-specific bugs. They won't necessary
>fix the bugs themselfs, but will have complete picture
>about all the issues in their subsystems and
>coordinate the bug fixing.
>
>Developers, please let me know your areas of
>expertese.
>I can overview Wine applications.
>
Let me see if I have this right  you want an inventory of who has what 
area of experise right. For example  if a bug report seems to point to a 
problem with sockets you could in theory assign it to Martin Wick, or if 
the problem was with copy protection It could be assigned to Laurent 
Pinchart.  Of course  that assumes that both of them are ok with this.

What exactly do you mean by overview applications? I'm guessing you mean 
the wine lib applications currently under /programs right?

Anyway this would be very usefull to the people who want to triage bugzilla.

>
>2) more formally define process of bugs handling and
>use this process. There is no high qualification
>needed to filter out bad bug reports, duplicates,
>request users for more information, attach relay trace
>to the bug, etc, etc.
>Result - developers will have to spend less time on
>discussion trivial bugs with users, will have better
>bug reports to work on, users will be more involved
>with more active feedback. Some users are very
>cooperative and some bug reports are really excellent!
>I see that Tony Lambregts, Michael Cardenas, others do
>a great work with the Bugzilla database.
>I'm also going to  contribute some time for this.
>  
>
Think if we can get a few more people to to help with this it would be 
better

>3) Prioritize bugs. This is, probably, part of (2).
>Some bugs, while relatively easy to fix provide very
>big value for the end user. Often developers do not
>choose such issues to work on, exactly because these
>issues do not present challenge to them.
>BTW, I do not see a field "Priority" in the bugs
>entries.
>

The Severity field is for this  and yes we should use it.

>
>4) Ask users to submit there problems in Bugzilla.
>Submitting Bugzilla report allows us to involve users
>more actively, persist their bug reports.
>
>Bugzilla is a more scalable approach than using
>mailing list only. Of course we still will discuss
>bugs on the mailing lists, bug big part of
>communication will be unloaded.
>  
>
If  there are no objections can we change the official documentation to 
say that bugzilla is the place to report bugs.   I noticed that when the 
wineinstall script had a bug in it that it told the users to report it 
to wine-devel  when it should point them to bugzilla.  One other comment 
about this is that bugzilla's address is 
http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugs/ and I think it scares people away from 
using it.  I have nothing against CodeWeavers but I think If bugzilla's 
address was http://www.winehq.com/bugzilla users would be certain it is 
the place for wine bugs

>There is a lot to do and discuss.
>For me the goal is to have this process not worse than
>in Mozilla project. This is impressive:
>http://webtools.mozilla.org/miscstats/
>http://mothra.mozilla.org/webtools/miscstats/
>
>I also like their bug report form:
>http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html
>
>And this is for 1 application only! I'm sure Wine can
>generate much bigger volume of bug reports ;-)
>
>Look forward for your comments.
>Andriy
>
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