New metabugs

[Francois Gouget]

On Fri, 2 May 2003, hatky wrote:
[...]
> > Anyway, don't let me slow you down.  Just remember that
> > bug tracking is a social issue, and you have to pay attention
> > to how the other developers feel about it.
> I am not sure what they realy think yes I only got 3
> responces 2 of witch where positive :)...
> I guess I will have to wait for the next week to start
> when codewaver will return to flame me (or not) :)

This is Wine's bugzilla so you don't need to worry about CodeWeavers
flaming you (or about the CodeWeavers' needs). However, as Dan said,
beware of the Wine developpers ;-).

I know I used meta-bugs in the past and we used them too in our internal
CodeWeavers bugzilla database. But meta-bugs are not very practical in
the long term and it is worth considering alternatives. In particular:

 * Component field
   Some developpers are specialized in a certain aspect of Wine. Havnig
specialists is good, it's certainly more efficient than having to learn
from scratch each time. So we need to provide a way for specialists to
find bugs in their area of expertise.
   The 'Component' field is one way to do so. Let's say you're a
Direct3D specialist, you can find bugs in that area by querying Bugzilla
for all bugs tagged with 'Component=wine-directx'.

 * keywords
   Keywords are another way to tag and query bugs. It's pretty flexible
and even lets you put multiple keywords on a bug. For instance you can
find all the bugs related to conformance testing by querying Bugzilla
for bugs that have the 'conformance' keyword. Similarly you can look for
all bugs related to programs for which the source is available by
searching for bugs with the 'source' keyword.
   See http://bugs.winehq.com/describekeywords.cgi



That being said,

 * Bugzilla queries don't appear to work. Newman do you know what's up?
Is it a database performance issue? Bugzilla bug?

 * Direct3D and DirectSound are pertty different areas. Maybe we should
split the wine-directx component into direct3d, directdraw, directsound
and the generic directx.

 * Maybe we need a 'wine-msvcrt' component. I know there are people
interested in msvcrt but looking at the component list I don't know
where such bugs would go. Or maybe we should be a bit more general and
have a 'wine-libc' so that it includes crtdll and potential future C++
libraries, etc.

 * Maybe we should add more keywords. I'm not saying we should do it,
but adding 'game' keyword would provide the same functionality as the
current game meta-bug. If we go this way, I could see another useful
keyword: 'installer' to identify all bugs related to application
installers. But we have to be careful not to add frivolous keywords.

 * One useful things that can be done now is to inspect all new bugs to
make sure that:
   - the component field is set correctly
   - the download URL to the binary or source is provided if applicable
     (in case of doubt ask the reporter)
   - all applicable keywords are set
   That said, things seem to be already pretty much in order (more so
for the component field than for keywords).

 * Maybe people don't know about the keywords, components and Bugzilla
queries. Maybe they need to be publicized somewhat.


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  A black hole is just God dividing by zero.