Solution to "not sure what component to file against" problems?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 21:23 +0100, John5342 wrote:
> 2009/4/14 Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>:
> > On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, John5342 wrote:
> >
> >> How about just "000". It would be the default but it wouldn't be
> >> encouraging people to file it without bothering to look. Long term
> >> solution (dependent on RH since bugzilla is run by them) would be to
> >> have something closer to the wizard like bug filing like kde
> >> bugzilla which actively encourages people to search for similar bugs
> >> before filing.
> >
> >  what about, if someone selects "not sure," popping up a dialog
> > window that asks for some relevant keywords at the very least?  while
> > the current bug reporting form contains space for "summary" and
> > "description", it would also be handy to have at least *something* to
> > search on with respect to a small set of keywords if one doesn't know
> > the component.
> 
> That is more or less exactly what the kde bugzilla does. It first asks
> a few details about the bug including keywords and then automatically
> presents a list of possible existing bugs that might be the same and
> the questions it asks also encourage users to find out at least
> roughly what package it refers to.

It's not generally a great idea to customize Bugzilla *too* much,
because then you wind up being responsible for large chunks of code
which are likely to be moving targets - they'll have to be adjusted
quite frequently as Bugzilla gets updated.

Mandriva used to have a heavily customized Bugzilla instance; the result
of this was it got stuck at an ancient and unsupported Bugzilla 2.x
release because no-one had time to port all the customizations to a
later version of 2.x, or to 3.0. In the end the cycle was broken by just
dumping all the customizations and sticking to a stock 3.x build.

I'm not really in favour of any heavy customizations to Bugzilla which
run the risk of leaving Fedora in the same position - and besides it's
rather against the Fedora spirit of carrying minimal patches and working
upstream.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net