andré klapper's blog.

…so i thought i should respectfully take a break here (at least for one night), before moving on and overtaking luis:

I wrote this about a year ago, now it’s time to publish this so it becomes easier for any potential successors willing to do this. so before the last person that remembers some ximian bugzilla wisdom finally leaves the project, it is time for a knowledge transfer before all this information would get lost.
I’d like to thank Novell for an interesting time, 7 t-shirts, a suse box, and a few bugs and bucks. ;-)

=======General.=======

• Why Everyone Needs A Bugmaster by Luis.
• Many users are just pissed if their software crashes, only few users spend time on filing a bug report, so be polite. Say thanks. (Just use the nice stock responses if you have enabled Javascript in your browser.) If you have an idea what could be a solution to the reporter’s problem, tell them, and set to NEEDINFO. If you need additional information by the reporter, explain them which additional information you need, and even more important: Tell them how they can get the additional information that you need. If you set a bug report to NEEDINFO, you must tell the reporter to REOPEN it when he adds more information. I have found many bugs where this was not told to the reporter, and so the bug was just forgotten. CC yourself if you like to. Make users happy, not necessarily yourself. ;-)
• If you add comments refering to another existing bug, the text “bug xxxxxx” (where xxxxxx is the number of some bug report) is automatically transformed to a hyperlink. So use “bug 987654” instead of “#987654” or even “987654”!
• Use keywords and get familiar with them. Keywords are extremely important for searching (also for searching for duplicates!).
• Some Evolution-specific keywords would be just useless for other applications then Evolution. Therefore they are on the Status whiteboard. Use it like “evolution[filters]” or “evolution[vfolders]”, please use the “evolution” namespace so this does not interfere with other Gnome applications. Take a look at the complete list of Evolution’s status whiteboard keywords. I have also added the entries “evolution[codecleanup]” and “evolution[nosip]”. You can also use the whiteboard to improve your own workflow by using custom tags, see the Status whiteboard neat tricks.
• If a bug report misses a version number and you can find it out, add it!
• Use the severity. People reporting bugs often use the preset (“normal”) or do not set the severity to “enhancement” though their wish definitely is an enhancement and not a bug.
• If you try to reproduce a bug, also add information about your own version and distribution.
• Crashes with stacktraces should be kept “unconfirmed” until they can be reproduced. If they include symbols and line numbers *and* are from an uptodate version, please set the status to NEW.
• If you like to be kept informed, use the weekly report.
• Take a look at Evolution’s Product Specific Traiging Guidelines. Update them, if necessary.
• When triaging, be aware which period of the Gnome development currently takes place. Take a look at the Gnome timetable. For example, if there’s a UI Freeze, it is not allowed to change the UI. Stable releases are under String Freeze always. If strings really must changed or added, you must inform the gnome-translators mailing list. See e.g. bug 321640.
• There’s a (developer) wiki available with information e.g. about the architecture or compiling from cvs: http://go-evolution.org.
• Searching for duplicates:
  • try synonyms. also think of gerunds, e.g. search both for “delet” and “remov”. It covers both “delete” and “deleting”.
  • crashs and their stacktraces: use the simpledupfinder. Only mark them as duplicates if they fit exactly, if they are quite similar add a comment. If you close a bug as a duplicate because of a stacktrace, explain why you close it. Users/reporters must not take a look into the stacktraces, and sometimes the same crashs happen in different situations so one gets irritated if the bug includes a totally different description then the original one.
• Last, but not least: If necessary, snap at the developers. It’s not the aim to be best friends, but to be productive and to have happy customers. You’re part of the marketing. Deal with it.

=======Common requests/tasks and their links (partially unpleasant, repetitive gruntwork ;-).=======

…and what have i done so far? time for a summary (the long version is available at http://home.arcor.de/ak-47/linux/gnome-release-team.html ).

my task: “showstopper tracking and nagging”, means: nag developers and better control of bugzilla. well, howto? that was the question…and these have been my thoughts so far:

• 2006-08
  (generally: not much time, lots of other work, and a bad modem-only connection in august and september, therefore not much done.)
  i began with going through all the “blocker” bugs. i triaged and poked on some of them, but finally realized that this stuff wouldn’t help that much to fulfil my underlying aims. i should definitely take a look at those bugs from time to time, but this is not a high priority.
• 2006-09-28
  i then began (beside compiling the entire cvs head meta-gnome-desktop by using jhbuild) to clean up the NEEDINFO bugs, beginning with the oldest ones.
  i think it is important that we have an up-to-date database, also with regard to which bugs do really exist. i hate real bugs rotting away just because somebody set them to needinfo without adding a reason, or because a reporter that has provided requested information has forgotten to reopen the bug (read: have had javascript disabled in his browser).
  i triaged about 300 bugs on that weekend, so now we have less then 50 needinfo bugs left that are older than 6 months.
• 2006-10-02
  now it’s time to get through open/needinfo bugs that have an ancient gnome target milestone. this was only 11 bugs, fine; now there are still 2 bugs left.
• 2006-10-05
  the duplicate finder looks like one possible way to go, it’s an easy way to identify serious issues.
• current affairs
  • i’m mostly working by using the duplicates.cgi page and the GNOME 2.16 blocker buglist.
  • filed bug 359885 and bug 363387 to get better results for duplicates.cgi. the latter one has been already fixed by olav, thanks!
  • i’m mostly content with the feedback on the bugs that i have considered as most important and urgent, some of them got fixed, and some of them are in progress. at least we killed bug 350975 now which had hundreds of duplicates.
    as i had already written, it would be interesting to find out which developers will be communicative and quick, and which ones will be lazy and unresponsive. so of course i try to use the traditional bugzilla comment as the first try to poke them, but sometimes i have to poke them on irc or by private email (yes, this has happened already).
  • there’s only few important gnome products still missing developer name information in bugzilla, i sent another reminder to d-d-l.
  • a huge thank you to elijah for already putting a showstopper nagging draft online, i will have to update this with my impressions when our email discussion has come to an end. ;-)
  • while evolution seems to be a bit more quiet at the moment with regard to evil crashers, nautilus definitely needs some love, as many of the duplicated crashers are nautilus issues. i’m glad to know that alex is looking at some of the main crashers, i cross my fingers and hope that he will be successful…
  • working on setting up a list of products that bind to the gnome release schedule and those that do not bind by getting through the mailing list archives, as branching has to be announced. also should take a look at products which are rather unmaintained or deprecated (means: no posting about any branching for a long time and no cvs activity), but are not yet part of the unmaintained list – there are some candidates… :-) – i guess those products aren’t flagged as “deprecated” somewhere in the *bug database*, but it would be great to have an option to hide bugs of deprecated products on the duplicates.cgi site.
  • another step to get faster and better fixing of important issues has been to improve and simplify the bugzilla stock answers, so that it’s easy for non-techie users to help us getting better stacktraces and requested information. this has happened already, next step is to simplify the GettingTraces wiki page. again, elijah has already come up with a proposal which now has become the default, and which we have improved a little bit so that i know hope that it has become easier to encourage users to provide useful stacktraces.
  • compiling gnome: i’m still stuck with compiling epiphany which does not work for me. second issue: my laptop is very good in overheating when compiling stuff. so i will have to poke a friend to open it and clean it.
• some thoughts on public showstopper reviews
  • a combination of duplicates.cgi and feedback of the bugsquad, developers
  • also consider GnomeGoals or gnome-doc-utils migration to become showstoppers
  • important to also have feedback from the bugsquad to have additional impressions of “what is important”
  • also consider the different importance of applications – the number of open bugs is an easy measure here.
  • make sure that everybody has added some developer name information to bugzilla
  • do criticize developers that are unresponsive
  • send to d-a-l and/or d-d-l?
  • i of course i volunteer for this, though i’d say that something like “every two weeks” would be a good period