On 21/10/10 21:47, Ian Clarke wrote: > Obviously there is a lot of frustration about the bugtracker. I think the > root of this frustration is the following three problems: > > 1) A lack of consensus as to what means what (eg. does the mere presence of > an open bug imply that it must be fixed?) >
I made a start at sorting out the library-related bugs just before GSoC. IIRC on many of the bugs there's a conceptual confusion between "priority" and "severity". We could do with a written standard on (what we want all of this stuff to mean), and (how to use it). > 2) A lack of consensus as to who is responsible for what (who decides what > must be fixed?) > This is related to the "roles" discussion we had at the meeting. I think that could help. It also touches upon another issue, which is the time-asymmetry between toad and us volunteer devs. For example, there's some major bugs assigned to me related to Library. I have various ideas on how to do it a slow-and-steady way, but toad (in part due to the release schedule) wants to do it a quick-and-dirty way. In the end he gets there first. In theory "we can change it later" but in practise this is hard. > 3) The bugtracker is permitted to get out of sync with reality (caused by 1 > and 2) > > For 1), I think the best philosophy is to keep things as simple as possible. > What is the purpose of a bugtracker? > > I would say its as a record of what problems people have discovered, and > also a snapshot of what tasks must be completed in order to meet some target > event (currently the 0.8 release). I think these two roles get confused - > simply recording a problem should not immediately create an expectation that > it will be fixed. That determination should probably be made only by > someone actually willing and able to fix it. > Yeah, this makes sense. I suggest we make a guidelines page on the wiki, [[Bug tracker standards]] or something. > I think we should probably try to have a weekly "bug-scrub", where we > quickly go through all outstanding bugs and confirm that any associated > metadata (time estimates, completion status, target milestone, assignee etc) > is correct. This process has worked well for me in other environments, > although they were commercial, not voluntary. As for whether this should be > over IRC, or perhaps over Skype I'm not sure, my past experience it was all > verbal and that seemed to work nicely. > This could be interesting. I don't know if many people will turn up to a weekly-one though. How many bugs could you get through in a typical session lasting say, 2 hours? X -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [email protected] http://freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
