Bugzilla semantics: marking bugs as triaged

[John Poelstra]

Adam Williamson said the following on 07/16/2009 04:41 PM Pacific Time:
> I had interesting discussions with Andy Lindeberg and jlaska today about
> the semantics of our current Bugzilla - and particularly triage -
> workflow.
> 
> We were thinking about the NEW / ASSIGNED dichotomy, and Andy and I came
> to the conclusion that it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
> 
> Right now, Bugzappers uses it one way, Andy uses it another for
> anaconda. In the Bugzappers process, ASSIGNED just means, really,
> Triaged: you set a bug to ASSIGNED once the triage process is complete. 
> 
> For Anaconda, Andy sets bugs to ASSIGNED once they're assigned to the
> correct anaconda maintainer (whether or not the rest of triage is yet
> fully completed).
> 
> Neither case is really terribly problematic, but they also don't make a
> whole lot of sense, really. Having 'triage completed' as a status is a
> bit arguable; it's not quite in the flow of the statuses, as a bug could
> be at a point 'beyond' ASSIGNED but not yet have been triaged, for
> instance. And it's also just semantically wrong - the word 'assigned'
> does not mean 'triaged'.
> 
> In the anaconda case, we just thought about it and decided the use of
> ASSIGNED isn't really _achieving_ anything: you can tell whether the
> bug's been assigned or not just by looking at who it's assigned to.
> 
> We sort of came to the conclusion that it'd probably make the most sense
> to have a 'Triaged' keyword that's used to affirm that a bug's been
> triaged (in fact there already is one, but it's not officially used in
> our current process), and abandon the distinction between NEW and
> ASSIGNED. Ideally, the ASSIGNED state would just be removed, but we
> could keep it and just note in our workflow / policy that it's not
> really used to mean anything in particular.
> 
> This could, I think, be implemented quite quickly if desired; I think we
> could rig something up to set all bugs in ASSIGNED state (except
> anaconda ones) to have the 'Triaged' keyword, that shouldn't be
> impossible.
> 
> We'd be interested in thoughts - negative, positive, whatever - on the
> idea. Thanks!
> 

This has been discussed at length before.  I believe the initial 
reluctance was changing the set process for a handful of people that 
wanted to do things differently and then trying to keep track of that. 
One major reason for not changing the state definitions was that the 
Fedora usage of the bug states was the same as RHEL.

At one time I thought the "keyword" approach was a good idea and it 
still seems to make a lot of good sense... I can't remember why we 
didn't move forward with it, but as you explain, it seems like a good 
compromise.

John