the utter failure of bugzilla (and us?)

[Matthias Fuchs]

Am Mittwoch 25 Mai 2011, 19:14:13 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> 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.

I agree that using bugzilla is a pain.

Though I think that simply restarting would not work as the problems that lead 
to the pain have to be tackled first. Otherwise the new system would start to 
cause pain too, just at some point later in the future.

Some ideas have already been suggested here and I can't comment on all of them 
atm. it is late here already.
So just some small points.

* Voting: Only allow if every user has just one vote per bug or use a 
different system
* closed tracker: Imo not the solution, especially if only people of a project 
are allowed as Martin suggested. Many bugs are completely valid -- like the 
multiple display ones in Plasma -- yet developers often can't reproduce them 
because of lack of hardware or whatever. The result would be indeed fewer 
reported bugs yet the reality would be quite different and very important bugs 
would simply not be reported.
Imo either users would abandon KDE as a result or create their own bug 
tracker, similar to the unofficial Catalyst one.
* Karma system for reporters: To me this sounds quite good, though to make 
this work I think there should be totally easy instructions on how to create 
good bug reports.

Then there is a problem I faced myself.
There are bugs which are totally valid yet it is _very_ hard or even 
impossible to fix them. Closing them would certainly not be the right way, yet 
marking them somehow, to not always have them listed with the rest would be 
nice.