Bugzilla semantics: marking bugs as triaged

[Jesse Keating]

On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 10:40 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 10:26 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > I would like to point out again for the record that it seems to me that
> > the primary reason bugzappers are altering the bug, in any way, is to
> > mark that they've been there, done that, and to avoid having duplicate
> > effort by other triagers on the same bug.  I know it's not the only
> > reason, but it seems to be the most significant.
> 
> This is not the theory; the primary reason for marking bugs triaged is
> intended to be for the benefit of developers. Whether or not it works
> this way in practice.

The benefit to the developer would be in properly assigning the bug to
the right component, or getting enough useful information out of the
reporter.  Such things should be evident without any other marking by a
triager.  Either there was value added to the bug and visible to the
maintainer, or there was nothing more to add.  In either case, the value
to the maintainer is there whether the triager has left footprints or
not, so it seems that the actual value of the /footprint/ is to prevent
multiple attempts at triaging.

> 
> > It's also worth pointing out that while there is an "official" meaning
> > of ASSIGNED, it's meaning has been contrived by the bugzappers crowd
> > whether or not the entire maintainer set agrees with it, and I think
> > it's abundantly clear that not all maintainers agree.
> 
> I believe it was not originally 'contrived', but rather based on RHEL
> practice. The ASSIGNED state has been defined to mean 'the bug has been
> triaged' since at least May 2008, when the Wiki page was imported from
> the old system:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow&oldid=15598
> 
> -- 
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
> http://www.happyassassin.net
> 

Based on RHEL is still contrived, because in the RHEL world, red tape
and upper management /assigns/ bugs to people to work on, whether they
want to or not.  In the Fedora world, maintainers have to accept bugs to
work on.  There is a big difference between 'You are going to work on
this' and 'I am going to work on this'.  In fact, using the RHEL
meaning, I would take offense as a maintainer if suddenly the triage
team is dictating to me what bugs I will work on.

Suffice to say there are plenty of maintainers who do not come from a
RHEL background, and who have a long history in Fedora and who have
developed their own way of using bug states to deal with their software.
Entirely too much energy has been spent on trying to argue about what
bug states mean when at the end of the day it really really really
doesn't matter to the triage efforts.  Triage can accomplish all of
their goals without ever touching the bug state.  Why spend time and
effort fighting over something that clearly doesn't matter?

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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