Summary of bugtracker situation discussion

[Martin Graesslin]

Hi Christoph,

during the Plasma sprint we discussed the bug situation and want to get your 
feedback on our ideas. In case there is a team mailing list please feel free 
to forward the mail. Our goal is to improve the situation with Plasma 2. We 
have to admit that we have failed with the current bugzilla situation and that 
we are probably not able to clean that up.

One of the problems we identified is that we just get way too many bug reports 
to be able to handle. All bugs and all wishlist items end up in the product 
plasma. That's just too much. Our idea here is to focus, focus and focus. The 
Plasma team only dedicates itself to maintain the "essential" parts (to be 
defined, e.g. taskmanager, digital clock, launcher...) everything else (e.g. 
comic strip) should not end up in the product plasma but in a different product 
or in many products. This could depend on what the maintainers of the products 
want.

With that change in place we should be able to reduce the number of incoming 
bug reports to a level that we could start caring. Our idea in that regard is 
that each of our essential components has a maintainer who looks into the bug 
reports.

Another idea is also to reduce the number of incoming crashers. One thing we 
had seen in the past is that 3rd party applets easily crash the system (hello 
python). We don't care about those. We could implement this by a system like 
what Linux kernel uses: 3rd party module means the system is tainted and the 
crash report gets discarded. That might filter out some legit crashes, but 
those will be reported again.

On the field of wishlist items we thought about not accepting any ideas for 
"new plasmoids" any more. We only care about the essential modules and thus 
are not interested in developing new non-essential plasmoids. So all incoming 
wishlist items for new plasmoids  could be just closed with a standardized 
message.

Last but not least we also had some ideas for the current situation. We don't 
think it's possible to ask the maintainers of essential modules to go through 
the Plasma 1 bugs and check whether they are still valid. Given the terrible 
state we would scare anybody away from becoming maintainer. So we need to 
improve that. One idea is to mass close everything which had been reported 
against a version before 4.11. 4.11 is our long-term release and everything 
else is unmaintained. This could cause some uncomfortable situations with our 
users but if we draft a well written message our users might be able to 
understand it. The second idea in that area is that we only care about the 
Plasmoids written in QML from the Plasma 1 times.

What do you think about these suggestions? Do you think that will help to 
improve the situation or do you have further and better ideas?

To the plasma team: in case I have forgotten something, please add it :-)

Thanks for your awesome work on the bugtracker!

Cheers
Martin
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