As Tiffany already mentioned in her blog post, Pedro and me hosted a Bugsquad BoF at Desktop Summit. There were not too many folks around (mostly the people from the previous session stayed in the room) but nevertheless it was very interesting as blauzahl was kind enough to answer lots of my questions about KDE’s bugtriaging processes.
No groundbreaking stuff to post, but it was an interesting insight.
- KDE Bugzilla has the Voting feature enabled. GNOME Bugzilla has not. I’m rather neutral about this so I was just curious.
- In KDE, bug reports of unmaintained or deprecated modules can be closed as RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED (though this is not done consequently), while GNOME Bugzilla uses RESOLVED WONTFIX combined with a “gnome[unmaintained]” Status Whiteboard entry for this. I like the idea of a separate resolution though I don’t remember if RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED is used for KDE3 apps that are dead, or KDE3 apps that have a KDE4 replacement, or both.
- Currently no community has bugdays (GNOME, KDE) which traditionally are an easy way to get new people involved (outreach) in the projects as many bug triagers move on to writing code after some time in the Bugsquad. Ubuntu has topic-oriented bugdays every week and uses them mostly to clean up the bug database of specific modules. The “Triaged” status in their bugtracker (Launchpad) helps avoiding duplication of work.
- Remaining question that was also a topic in the previous BoF in that room: Where to share patches, especially for long-term distributions (RHED, SLED, LTS) && projects that are unmaintained in upstream development (e.g. KDE3-only components or deprecated GNOME2 components), and how to improve upstreaming efforts. One idea was to use Bugzilla’s “Default CC list” option for downstream packages to get notified of patches (but bugmail options don’t have a “trigger for patches only” setting).
- Speaking about statistics in general (and as I am impressed by the MeeGo Community and Activity Metrics), efforts in KDE seem to be very similar to those in GNOME, namely Quarterly reports and a Commit digest, but nothing targetting the bigger picture either.
