Draft for 'Bugzilla processes and procedures' mail to developers

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 21:22 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:

> > Hi, -devel-list folks!
> > 
> > We in the Bugzappers team (part of the QA group) are working to revise
> > our Wiki space, and as part of that, various questions have arisen with
> > regards to Bugzilla procedures. A lot of the same issues have come up on
> > this list in the recent past.
> > 
> > In general, it seems like Fedora doesn't really have a properly defined
> > procedure for exactly how a bug should flow. Every maintainer, reporter
> > and triager has a slightly different idea of what each status or
> > resolution or keyword means, and when and by whom they should be
> > applied.
> 
> I think you are overstating a problem that I'm not sure exists.  We have 
> defined the states here:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow
> Why not improve on what is there?

> I think it is great you want to tackle and clarify these things.  Having 
> gone through a round myself with this process I guess I learned that 
> some ambiguity wasn't as harmful as I first thought. :)

You're right, of course. Somehow I'd forgotten about that flow.

So, I will revise the draft substantially. :) Here's my quick thoughts:

The obvious bit of hand-waviness in the graphic is the resolutions, we
don't define them (and it doesn't list some at all). DUPLICATE is
simple, and ERRATA and RAWHIDE are known: fixed bugs in official
releases are closed as ERRATA (should be done automatically), and fixed
bugs in Rawhide are closed as RAWHIDE (manually). Those we can write
down into that page without any discussion, I think.

We do, however, need to define what 'cantfix', 'wontfix', 'notabug',
and 'worksforme' are for. We should also explicitly state which
resolutions aren't used for Fedora (I think 'deferred', 'currentrelease'
and 'nextrelease' fit into this category) so they don't get used on
Fedora bugs by mistake.

It would really be nice, in fact, if we could have Bugzilla only show
the statuses and resolutions appropriate to the product the bug is filed
on...not sure if that's possible, though.

I will send a completely revised draft mail tomorrow, focussing on the
issues that are really valid.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net