Charles,

> I have just added 2.1a1 as a version.

-1.  Please revert this.

This is something I didn't request.  Alphas, betas, and release candidates
should not be specified as part of the major version number in a bug system.
Aside from simply increasing the number of values for an important field
(hence making searches/categorization more onerous), it doesn't serve any
useful purpose.  It also makes it more difficult to i) evaluate the bugs
that need to be evaluated before final release and ii) list the bugs that
actually are present in the release, post official release.

> Do we want to add 2.1 and 3.0 before they are released? It could make
> life confusing for bug reporters and for us.
> I suggest we add new versions to Bugzilla as part of the release cycle.

Absolutely.  The versions that should be added to Bugzilla should be 2.1 and
3.0.  They should be added now.  2.1 will allow us to record user and
developer discovered issues in 2.1.  3.0 will allow us to record bugs
discovered in the course of developing 3.0.  The actual Release is the
middle of the game, not the beginning. 

Right now the bug system is effectively useless for accurately recording
James bugs.  That's one of the reasons that nobody uses it (I think I've
recorded over half the new bugs in Bugzilla since August, and there have
been a lot more bugs than that).  Fixing this would go a small way towards
making it more usable.

Properly designed bug systems always include version numbers pre-release.
That allows developers working on a particular release to record bugs found
in new features, bugs in old features being improved, or bugs just exposed
via the results of new test cases.  If it is necessary to include a notation
that the bug was discovered pre-release, either a "stage"
(pre-release/post-release) or a minor version (alpha#, beta#, rc#) field is
appropriate.

Ask yourself the following question.  How would I have recorded a bug found
in FetchPOP in September?  Version unspecified?  Not very useful.  Version
2.0a3?  This feature wasn't even present in that version.  The correct
answer was (and should've been) 2.1, as that indicates both the time of
discovery (sometime in the 2.1 cycle) and allows committers to easily
evaluate the relevant bugs when considering release.  It also allows users
to discover which bugs remain in their version post-release.

There's a lot of room for additional improvement in the bug system (i.e
found-in vs. fixed-in versions, etc.) but this alone would make accurate bug
reporting easier.
 
> Also, would it be useful to add Mailet API versions e.g. API_1.0 etc.?

A full revisit of the component list is probably appropriate early in the
3.0 cycle.  I'd rather we did this all at once, rather than piecemeal.

--Peter



--
To unsubscribe, e-mail:   <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Reply via email to