the utter failure of bugzilla (and us?)

[todd rme]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> hi ...
>
> so, congratulations everyone, plasma is #3 in bugs.kde.org with over 1300
> reports:
>
>        https://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi
>
> trawling through some right now, it seems that probably ~5% are actual issues,
> 5-15% more are things that could be improved, and the rest is mostly
> duplicates, downstreams/upstream or flawed reports.
>
> thing is, with 1300 reports, doing 1 per minute would take 21+ hours. and with
> bugzilla it is a LOT more than 1 minute per bug. probably closer to 10 for
> full inspection and resolution. which means 210 hours, at best.
>
> that we got here is beyond me. i think the issues are obvious:
>
> * we don't have a sufficient bug triage team
> * the user community is enabled to stuff any crap they wish into the database,
> making the signal-to-noise ratio absolutely horrid
> * bugzilla is slow
> * bugzilla has horrifically bad usability
>
> we ought to find a way to improve on this situation, but tackling one or more
> of the above.
>
> i don't have any answers right now, just frustrations.

One thing, from a user perspective, is how drkonqi handles crash
reports.  From my reading, it urges you to submit a duplicate unless
you are absolutely sure that it is the exact same thing, and most
users do not understand enough about backtraces to determine this.
This will invariably lead to a large number of duplicates.  If
possible, a better way to compare crash reports to determine if they
are duplicates would help a lot.

-Todd