the utter failure of bugzilla (and us?)

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Monday 30 May 2011 01:06:07 Matthias Fuchs wrote:
> 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.
please have a look at http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Bugtracker and extend where you 
think it is needed.

Cheers
Martin

P.S.: I think documenting in a wiki is better than long mailinglist threads nobody will read again 
:-)
> 
> 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.
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