Bugreporting barrier is too low with the new Dr. Konqi

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Matt,

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 05:07, Matt Rogers <mattr at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 November 2009 04:25:27 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
...
>> If there is something to blame I would rather look on the bugzilla
>> side, it is maybe not the appropriate tool for bug handling at that
>> scale, and this will get worse the more users we get. I know there is
>> not much of alternatives in the Free Software world, but there are
>> other tools around that are free to use for Free Software projects,
>> scaling much better than bugzilla ever will. Some lobbying there might
>> convince the manufacturers of these tools to free their code, who
>> knows? Just MHO.
>
> My personal opinion is that the issue revolves more around how we're using
> bugzilla vs. bugzilla itself. If it really sucked that badly, it wouldn't be
> the de facto standard for nearly ever large open source project.

Well, this could simply be historical, since there was not much out
there in the FOSS world, and, with all the work put into it, people
tend to stick to it
>
> If there are concrete improvements that you would like made, please suggest
> them by filing a wishlist against b.k.o itself (it has its own product in
> bugzilla) so that I at least know what you want. Others have done this, and
> while I tend to be rather slow sometimes, I do care about getting any
> improvements made that are beneficial to others.

Matt, I am more expressing personal impressions I gather from my bug
triaging work and I fall short of proposing real solutions. All I can
state here is that Bugzilla is not exactly what I consider an easy to
use tool, it feels clumsy, the query usability is very nerdy but not
really good, since you end up with holding Ctrl buttons all the time
to select stuff, the number of legal keywords is too small and only
admins can change those, the discoverability of advance searches is
non-existent (I might not be a developer, but I use computers since
30+ years and still struggle to find stuff in Bugzilla). And it is
slow, some periods of the day you really need patience, it slows down
the workflow, and we too often are faced with messages like 'too many
open accounts, try again later'. That's what I think is a scalability
problem and, with KDE growing bigger and bigger, this is a serious
issue.

I use Bugzilla all day long, as you can see in the stats, and I dream
of being able to do queries more easily. Currently, triaging is a per
bug work which takes a tremendous amount of time that could be spent
more efficiently elsewhere. Seriously, I more often use the search
function in my Google mail for keywords and find stuff faster in the
bug reports I am subscribed to than querying Bugzilla. Making personal
lists of key bugs for duplicates is still something I haven't found to
be easy. And even if one has a list, you have to keep that list open
to see the titles (where I put crash information to be able to find
those again), so I always end up with 10+ browser tabs. Maybe I am
doing it all wrong and there is an easier way to do that stuff, but I
still haven't found it...


Regards, Myriam.
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