make "bisected" a keyword in bugzilla?

Vincent Povirk madewokherd at gmail.com
Sat May 22 22:45:32 CDT 2010


I'm starting to wonder about the use cases for both of those keywords.

Personally, I mostly ignore the "regression" keyword. As a developer
looking for bugs to work on, I've found it not very useful. At a given
point in time, most regression bugs are not easier, more severe, or
more important than the others, nor are there (to my knowledge) people
who work best on regression bugs.

If my name appears in a bugzilla comment (usually because my patch
broke something), it gets caught by a gmail filter and I pay
attention. If a patch I write causes a regression, it suggests
something is wrong or incomplete about the patch, and I should look at
it while it's fresh.

(I assume that such monitoring is not usually necessary because the
patch author will be CC'd. I am unusual because the email address I
use to send patches is not the same address I use on bugzilla. Also I
use gmail filters obsessively.)

The patch that switched gdiplus to builtin by default is an exception.
It tells me nothing new. I don't mind seeing the regression keyword on
those bugs because I don't use it, and anyway I pay attention to all
the gdiplus bugs.

So, at least for those I cause, it helps if regressions are found and
bisected as soon as possible, so that the original patch is fresh in
my head. I know Wylda has been bisecting regressions that others have
reported, and if adding a keyword makes that easier, I'm all for it.
Does it?

Perhaps the ability to search for non-bisected regressions would be
useful, since bisecting is something that anyone with the ability to
build wine and access to the software can do. I believe it's also
time-critical, because:
* As time goes on, it gets harder to build old versions of Wine on
modern distributions, because new versions of build tools tend to
break things. Wine accumulates build fixes that are not present in old
versions.
* The more time passes since the patch was originally written, the
more likely it is that the author has moved on.
* Even when the author is still around, it's easier to work on recent
regressions than old ones.

Perhaps, if we could easily see which regressions still need to be
bisected, someone could make it a goal that all newly-reported
regressions are bisected within a few months. When an unbisected
regression starts to get stale, perhaps someone could post something
on wine-users like "Does anyone own <product name>? It has a
regression that needs bisecting."

But that's not something I would do. I'm a developer, not a community manager.

Anyway, I think we should talk about how people use the regression
keyword now, and how they would use this new keyword, and that should
determine whether it gets added.



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