linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH] Update REPORTING-BUGS

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Message-Id: <200711260104.25911.rjw@sisk.pl>
Date:	Mon, 26 Nov 2007 01:04:25 +0100
From:	"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@...k.pl>
To:	Adrian Bunk <bunk@...nel.org>
Cc:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] Update REPORTING-BUGS

On Monday, 26 of November 2007, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 12:00:28AM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Sunday, 25 of November 2007, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> >...
> > > I don't care whether that's done with Bugzilla, some email based bug 
> > > tracker like the Debian bug tracker, someone putting emails manually 
> > > into some bug tracker like you are doing, or whatever else.
> > 
> > That last solution doesn't scale very well ...
> > 
> > How about using the system in which it's possible to report bugs using both
> > email and a web interface?
> > 
> > We can request that the address of the bug tracker be added to the Cc lists of
> > bug reports sent by email and we can make it resend reports filed with it to
> > the appropriate mailing lists and with the appropriate email headers.  This is
> > technically doable.
> 
> You are trying to solve something that is not a problem.

It _is_ a problem, because many bug are reported using email and not really
tracked.  The ones that I manually put into the Bugzilla are the tip of the
iceberg (and BTW I'd prefer not to have to do that manually).

Every bug reported by email and not responded to by the right people, that is
not a recent regression, is currently lost.  I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

> It does not matter which medium we choose for getting bug reports.

[Well, you said that we should use a web interface for that. ;-)]

No, it doesn't, as long as the bug reports reach the right place.  Now, the
question is what's that.

IMO, ideally, for each subsystem there should be a mailing list to send bug
reports to.  The Bugzilla should forward the reports to these lists.  On every
such list there should be (at least) one person responsible for responding to
the bug reports, if no one else responds first, and for forwarding the reports
to the appropriate developers.  This person should also be responsible for
monitoring the status of each bug report sent to his/her list.

_Every_ bug report sent (including invalid ones) should be recorded in a bug
tracking system (be it the Bugzilla or whatever else) along with all of it's
history (at least, refernces to the bug's history should be stored), no matter
how it's been handled.  Moreover, a bug can only be resolved as "fixed" if
there's a pointer to the exact commit fixing it in the bug's history.

> The only thing that matters is that we get bug reports resolved within a 
> reasonable amount of time.

I'm not sure if that's generally possible:
- What about the bugs that take 2 weeks or more to reproduce?
- What about the bugs that we _don't_ _know_ how to fix?

Rafael
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