Salikh, there is some truth in your words... Yes, if we got a big issue then nothing strange in fixing it by 2, 3 or 10 people. And fix will probably appear faster and will be better.
But most of 700 open issues in JIRA now are rather simple issues. Like wrong exception, no exception and so on. How many people will we need to add an NPE check? 2, 3 or 10? There is an old joke: "How many programmers do you need to change the lamp?" :) And it's real pain to open tens of simple issues to check if somebody already working on it. Impossibility of setting "patch available" flag makes the situation even worse because you should check already fixed issues too while you find some free to fix issue. So adding additional assignee field will help to sort the issues and will make life for all contributors easier. From the other hand it will not bring any troubles in fixing complicated issues by teams. Is it a problem of contributors or managers? I'm not a manger... yet... :) So I do not know is it important for them or not. I've never heard any questions from my manager about JIRA processing. Contributors? I'm, as a Harmony contributor, has a problem with searching issues. I've asked few Harmony contributors around and they supported my vision. So I would say that there is a problem for Harmony contributors and I know nothing about managers. SY, Alexey 2006/12/15, Salikh Zakirov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Original problem statement was formulated by Mikhail: > For example, if the JIRA is not assigned then there is no simple way to > understand if there's activity in there except opening it in web-browser and > reading comments. I would argue that anyone who is really going to work on an issue, will definitely want to read through issue comments carefully, so this is not a problem for contributors. Rather, this is a problem of managers of employees assigned to work on the Harmony project, as they (managers) do not have good means to monitor what issues engineers work on. > Only committers could modify the status of JIRAs and put them "In progress" > mode. As we have not so many committers they could not monitor large number > of open JIRA. From the point of view of open-source community (set aside corporate culture etc.), there is no difference between "unassigned" and "in progress" issue, as this basically means that the fix is still not available. And if anyone _really_ interested in fixing a problem, then reading comments and interacting with others interested in the same problem is *good*. It facilitates better patch and design review, and overall leads to a better software quality. However, several engineers working on the same problem is perceived as an inefficiency in corporate setting, and thus is stated as a problem. Thus, the second problem is also induced by _sponsoring corporations_. In short, both Harmony contributors and committers (with "Harmony hat on") have *none* of the stated above problems. It is managers of sponsoring corporations that need improvement in JIRA searching capabilities. I am not suggesting that Harmony should ignore wishes of the managers of sponsoring corporations, but I think that the problem could be solved much better if the problem and its justification is stated clearly, without alluding to contributor problems which do not really exist. But then, with current JIRA configurations, some problems do exist, which could be addressed tweaking JIRA configuration, but now requires mail communication. This is something that I encountered in *my practice*: * When submitting a patch for an issue filed by someone else, the committer attention will not be attracted automatically, because I can't set 'patch available' status. The workaround for this is to create subtask for the fixed issue, and attach patch to that subtask, with 'patch available' set. IMHO, this workaround is good enough. * When searching for issues related to particular component, I can easily miss some of them, because '[component]' notation is not universally used (now and then someone forgets to add component), and since only committers and submitters are allowed to edit jira summary and categories, cleaning up issues requires mail communications. IMHO, None of this is critical, and may be left as is. > How about the following structure: > 1) Contributor assignee field for everybody (if a committer working on > patch preparation he/she should use this field). Also, for example, if it's > non-null then the status of unresolved JIRA is "In progress" automatically. > 2) Committer assignee field for committers These are not really needed neither to committers, nor to contributors. It will not do any harm though, and definitely will be useful for sponsoring corporations. So, +0 > 3) Everybody could set "Patch available" tag (another option is: JIRA > contributor assignee, JIRA author or committers coud set this tag) This will make submitting patches easier for contributors. +1
