[Bugsquad] KDE PIM Meeting Rumors

[Christophe Giboudeaux]

Hi, 

Welcome to the bugsquad list. We didn't see much activity on this list since.. 
ages :)

I'm Christophe and I almost only triage kdepim bugs (akonadi, kontact, kmail, 
akregator...)

On Saturday 11 February 2012 23:26:18 Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:

> As a Free Software enthusiast, having operated before, and currently
> operating a few bugzilla instances for Free Software projects, I'd like to
> help you with what has been mentioned here, during the KDE PIM meeting in
> Osnabrueck, is quite a serious problem; the bugzilla installation for KDE
> seems to be overgrown with cruft, that either needs review, or needs
> additional information, or needs to go away and disappear.

Yes, that's true for any large and successful project :-) 

We're not in such a critical situation. The stats page reports we have less 
than 22000 reports opened. It's wayyyyyy better than a few years ago.

To reduce the amount of useless reports (specially crash reports), drkonqi 
(the bug reporting tool for KDE Apps) was greatly improved in KDE4.

The first step was to prevent useless backtrace. This was done in KDE 4.5 (or 
4.6, I'm not sure). When a crash report doesn't have enough debug 
informations, the user is invited to install some debug packages.

The second step arrived in 4.8: if drkonqi detects that the bug is already 
reported, it doesn't allow creating a duplicate bug and appends the new 
informations to the existing report (this was only an option in previous 
versions).

This seems to work nicely. I've seen less report when 4.8 was released than in 
any version since 4.1.

Now, the not-so-bright side:
- Wishlist bugs: 
  * Triagers can't read in the app maintainer mind and deal with these reports 
easily
  * Reporters usually want things that fit their workflow without first 
checking if it can be useful for anyone else (I did a quick kmail1 wish review 
some months ago, if every wish was granted, it would have ~ 50 new buttons and 
~80 new options)

- normal bugs: 
 * Reporters usually don't search if their issue is already reported. It's 
probably not easy enough to guess what you should look for (the simple search 
is too simple and the detailed one is too complex).

> 
> Currently still involved in making such happen with the Cyrus Project
> (Carnegie Mellon University, responsible for Cyrus IMAP and Cyrus SASL), I'd
> like to think I can help you clean up Bugzilla (workflows, triaging, etc.).
> 

Good idea, do you want to focus on particular bugzilla products ?
To assist you, we have a small triaging guide there 
http://techbase.kde.org/User:Blauzahl/How_to_triage_bugs (note for self: it 
needs some updates and to be moved to a better location)
We're also on #kde-bugs if necessary.

> I would like to know if there's currently a process in place to make sure
> that Bugzilla is *the* location for our developers to look for things to
> do.
> 

Can you clarify 'our developers' please ? 

Christophe



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