Comments on: Dropping those old crasher reports

By: aklapper

aklapper — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:51:13 +0000

Brian: Bug-Buddy already blocks some reports (e.g. empty traces), and we also server-side block some crashers with a high number of duplicates (so called auto-reject feature in gnome bugzilla). also, ubuntu has started to report bugs by default against their own bug tracking system instead of gnome bugzilla for ubuntu 7.04.
however, the number of bug reports has increased for the last two years by 80% each year, so we *have* to act, because this getting more and more. i triage a lot of reports and i can tell you that more than 90% of the 2.16 reports are duplicates.

By: Brian Nickel

Brian Nickel — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:40:15 +0000

I didn’t realize the dupe load was so bad. I thought the new features in bug buddy were reducing this significantly. Would it be possible to improve Bug Buddy to catch more of these?

By: ovitters

ovitters — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:05:40 +0000

Brian: I misunderstood then.

But again, I’m not going to say that they should upgrade.

I can explain the need: We get a minimum of 2000 bugreports/week. This amount is causing a huge workload on our Bugsquad. The work usually consists of marking it as a duplicate. The GNOME 2.16 crashers would reduce the workload by 1000 bugreports a week.
Ideally, every bugreport would get special attention by the Bugsquad. Then they would receive the ‘bug was reported before, see that bug’. However, at a certain point you cannot support such things anymore. Also, I’d love if we’d have a Socorro server, etc, etc. But we don’t have it.
So I understand what you mean, but it is just not practical.

Lastly, this is not about backporting fixes. This is purely regarding Bugsquad and ensuring the members don’t go away because of the high voluntary workload. Whatever developers/maintainer do after that is up to them.

By: Brian Nickel

Brian Nickel — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 02:43:11 +0000

ovitters: That’s not what I was saying. The scenario as is stands is a user of 2.16 submits a report via bug-buddy. From what you’ve said, I would assume they get a message along the lines of “Your version is no longer supported and your bug report will be ignored.” There will probably be more eloquent wording, but that’s the gist of it. If the user is using a MAINSTREAM distribution that don’t yet provide GNOME 2.16, they are left with no solution other than changing distros or using a beta repository.

I understand the pretty much every bug has been reported, but under the current system, they should be receiving some sort of message along the lines of “This bug has already been reported,” or “This bug has already been resolved.” I don’t see where the need for this really comes from.

Of course, it is my honest opinion that fixes for crashers should be backported for commonly used GNOME releases, even if all other work on the branch has ceased.

By: ovitters

ovitters — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:33:41 +0000

Brian: I never proposed such a message, nor that we drop 2.16 bugreports. What I proposed was not accepting incoming 2.16 or older crash reports. That is entirely different. The chance of a new crasher is very low.

It is NOT about ‘this bug might be fixed’. It is about “this bug is likely already reported a couple of hundred times”.

By: ken

ken — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:31:54 +0000

Just so long as it goes back a couple of releases. There’s nothing worse than finding a nasty bug, submitting it, and having it closed because it *might* be fixed in SVN. (Gee, thanks, I think I’ll waste my weekend figuring out how to download GNOME source and build it all again, just to check this one bug.) Or, just as bad, because it might be fixed in a newer GNOME release which my distro doesn’t have packaged yet.

By: Brian Nickel

Brian Nickel — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:35:31 +0000

I think it’s really tacky to send a user “Your software is outdated, please upgrade.” or something along those lines if they are on the latest version available for their distribution. If it is the case that no new bugs could be reported from 2.16, then they should be getting a “This bug has already been fixed.” message anyway.

As an angry bug reported (I hate to admit it, but I usually am), this would just piss me off even more. You should really hold off until the major distros have moved beyond 2.16 in their stable releases.

- Brian

By: ovitters

ovitters — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:16:38 +0000

Yeah, I meant dropping the incoming bugreports, not the existing bugs.

By: reinouts

reinouts — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:15:11 +0000

It’s not just about queries. It’s about useless bug-buddy reports pouring in. Someone has to spend the time triaging the reports from old versions that aren’t going to be fixed anyhow.

By: LpSolit

LpSolit — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:17:34 +0000

Why not ignoring these old bugs in your queries? Don’t select bugs with a version