Is bugzilla worth keeping?

[Jeroen Janssen]

Well,

I personally think a bugtracking tool (like bugzilla) is needed for any 
software development project. It helps you collect bugs on a central 
place and you can keep track on the things that matter.

However, it will only work 'correctly' if both the developers and people 
that submit bugs work together.

If there is no developer (activily) looking at the submitted bugs, 
people will complain about it and probably stop submitting and go 
somewhere else.

If there are no (non developers) submitting bugs, you could still use it 
to 'implement' features, using the bugtracking tool to keep track of 
what's happening.

Anyway, I don't know how bugzilla has been used in the past, but if I 
have a simple look at the 'available' buglist, I see that bug 11 is 
still marked as NEW (which sounds odd as it was submitted somewhere in 2000)

Maybe a "janitor" project to cleanup the winehq bugzilla is really 
needed? But you would need some kind of plan to work on the 'backlog'.

You could:

* start on bug 1 going up and checking if it isn't solved yet. 
Eventually you'll end up at the latest bugs, but that means you'll 
probably hit a dead end often before you'll reap the benefits out of it.

* start on the last submitted bug going down, because it's most recent 
found and probably fresh in memory & easily reproduceable. But that 
might 'annoy' people who have longer outstanding bugs.

* etc..

Doing this might be a good job for developers wanting to start on wine 
(me?) : trying to reproduce/pinpoint a problem, maybe solve it or hand 
it over to a developer with enough information for solving the bug?

On the other hand, for now I'm probably just only interested in the bugs 
I hit into and less interested in other peoples bugs (<sarcastic mode 
on>after all, I want my program to run correctly, who cares if someone 
elses program is running</sarcastic mode off>)

Anyway, just some of my thoughts...

Jeroen

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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> If so, does it matter?
> 
> If we were to simply drop bugzilla, how would it impact the project?
> 
> Thoughts, anybody?
> 
> thanks -mike
> 
> 
>