Fwd: [Bugsquad] Something for the bugsquad :)

[Martin Graesslin]

On Saturday 25 May 2013 14:11:57 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> You don't care for the users? Don't release anything to the public and
> keep it to yourselves! But if you release an boast about it, do your
> homework, and that means handling the bug database yourself!
I don't think that the blame game is helping anything here. I think we need to 
figure out what's going wrong and how to fix the problems. That's what I'm 
trying to do. Plasma is different to all other products in KDE. For example 
over the last year 1885 new bugs were reported against Plasma. The second 
largest project in top ten is KMail with 706. The difference here is that KMail 
is just in a difficult state and Plasma is by now quite a mature product. KWin 
got 849 but there are two developers constantly working on it. And yes I think 
our time would be better spent. Amarok got 808 and that they survive is 
largely thanks to you. Both have something in common: we get crashes in a 
lower layer which are relatively easy to triage.

We just have to accept that Plasma gets more bugs than the developers can 
handle. That's a bad situation but probably also part of the frustration. Even 
if the developers would work perfectly on the bugs it would still be like 
Sisyphos. The developer base is hardly larger than what KWin has. But we would 
not be able to handle twice the number of bug reports.

So we need to stop the flood. We need to get the bug tracker into a workable 
state and triaging is not the solution.

My aims are:
* get the number of bugs down without having humans looking at the reports
* reduce the number of bugs coming in
* filter out new bugs quicker (I have some ideas especially for crashes)
* introduce more components
* assign maintainers to the components
* get the maintainers to care ;-)

Yes we need some rethinking, but I think that will come when the bugtracker 
gets into a useable state. I know it also from own experience. When KWin had 
more than 400 bugs it just was unusable. We were fixing bugs but the report 
stayed open because we couldn't find it. Now it's not a problem any more, since 
we have components it's even trivial.

Cheers
Martin