Re: Random BTS musings
On Sun, Jul 29, 2001 at 07:07:13AM -0600, Bdale Garbee wrote:
> mdz@debian.org (Matt Zimmerman) writes:
>
> I'd love to see the general clue level of bug reports go up, and of course
> I'd love for every bug report to include a suggested patch. But, I think
> that one of the "prices of success" is that as our user base broadens, we
> will encounter more and more people for whom computing is a tool, not an
> obsession... and that means it is inevitable that the bug system "noise" will
> go up.
>
> The solution to that is *not* to increase the complexity of the BTS, but
> rather to have more eyeballs working on *resolving* the bugs as they arrive.
Good eyeballs are hard to come by, and difficult to train. I would rather try
to make life easier for those that we do have, and focus their attention where
it is most needed.
> > The BTS really needs a redesign, to learn from the other bug reporting
> > systems out there.
>
> While I am not adverse to carefully-considered changes, I would like to point
> out that one of the reasons the Debian BTS has been so successful both for us
> and for some other groups that I work with that have adopted it for their
> use... is that it is *not* like the other bug reporting systems out there.
Don't get me wrong; I think debbugs has a lot going for it. The mail-based
control system, for example, is very elegant for our purposes. But it is
difficult to track whether a bug is being dealt with or not.
> I can't help but think that the time spent fiddling with the classification
> information on bug reports would be better spent actually working on fixing
> the bugs themselves!
>
> Even our existing tag mechanism doesn't get used very much... and if it were
> my choice, we'd have fewer severity levels defined. Too many choices just
> increases the process overhead for those who are fundamentally volunteering
> their time to help "make the world safe for bits..."
Maybe I'm being selfish. I often read through the RC bug list and
debian-bugs-dist and try to help get bugs fixed. For each bug that is already
being adequately handled by the maintainer, I have to load it in my browser
(which is not a fast operation) and read through the messages to find this out.
This is a waste of my time, and it means I look at fewer bugs in the time I
have available. I would like to be able to skip directly to bugs that are
ignored, overlooked or whose maintainer needs help.
--
- mdz
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