Maintainer Responsibilities

[Till Maas]

On Wed June 3 2009, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> And I don't think we can make bug reports any easier, the point is that the
> information is required, those "complicated" forms are there to request the
> information we need.

I disagree:

On https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora there are around 
29 form elements and the majority of these elements does not need to be used 
by the non experienced bug reporter or are not used at all.

Absolutely required are imho: component, version, summary, description, 
security sensitive bug, External Bug and sometimes attachments or URL (8 
elements). Rarely the platform is required, but there does not need to be such 
a long list of different archs for the normal user.
There are also some elements that are not used at all: OS, Target Milestone, 
QA Contact, Estimated Hours and Deadline (5 elements) or not yet always used: 
severity and priority. Also the "Fedora Project Contributors" checkbox seems 
not to be used.

The other elements are only used by experienced bug reporters or within the 
triage process, e.g. Assign To, CC, Alias, Whiteboard, Clone Of, Keywords, 
Depends on, blocks, 4 flags (12 elements).

In conclusion, more than 66% of the form elements can be removed for the 
unexperienced bug reporter. Also the component selection process could be made 
easier, because the mapping from rpms to components could be made 
automatically after a bug reporter supplied the name of the rpm he had 
problems with.

Regards
Till
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