Summary of bugtracker situation discussion

[David Edmundson]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 8:48 AM, Martin Graesslin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
I would prefer to consider it as; there are too many reports for us to
triage, so we will send the reporter message them a message asking
them to triage their own bug. They should test if it still applies in
the new Plasma and reopen on the new product accordingly. Till then we
will close it.

In practice it amounts to the same thing, but it comes across better.

> 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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