What do we need from Bugzilla? (was: My roadmap for a better Fedora)

[Les Mikesell]

Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
> * Les Mikesell [21/11/2008 20:49] :
>>> Deciding to push a bug upstream or not cannot be reduced to checking a
>>> box or pushing a button.
>> Wrong answer, if anyone actually wants those bug reports.
> 
> Sheer volume of bug reports will not improve development, especially
> if the increase is only in the form of duplicate bugs.

I'd assume a model where some small percentage are valuable so 
increasing the volume will bring in more meaningful ones.  The hard part 
is filtering them without losing the good ones.

> In fact, this
> will slow down development because more time will have to be spent on
> bug triage, taking time away from bug fixing.

That's something that less specialized volunteers could do.  They would 
only need to understand the bugzilla structure and how to determine if a 
new entry was a duplicate or not.  Maybe that could even be automated. 
If you can't describe the process well enough to automate it, you can't 
expect a new user with a problem to be able to understand what you want 
them to do.  Even the worst case of replying with a mailman 
auto-response that has a FAQ for the bugzilla and list of currently 
known problems would be better than no contact at all and would leave 
you with a database of user experiences that you could mine if you 
decide it is worthwhile.  And the better case gets the email of an 
affected user that will provide the details you need to solve a problem 
into the tracking ticket.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com