Re: Linux 2.6.21

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 03:15:42PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> This means we need people who figure out who to assign bugs too.
> Aka bugmasters.
> 
> BTW one big problem in our current bugzilla is that a lot of people
> cannot reassign bugs they don't own. I sometimes see bugs that I don't
> own bug I know who is responsible, but bugzilla doesn't allow me to do it.
> 
> So I think what would help:
> 
> - Ask more people to just categorize and reassign bugs (anybody interested?)
> - Give more people in bugzilla the power to reassign arbitary bugs
> (bugzilla maintainers would need to do that)

Folks might want to take a look at the Debian Bug Tracking System
(BTS).  It has a web interface which you can use to query history, but
*everything* is e-mail driven, and the way you submit, close, update,
tag/classfy bugs --- everything --- is via e-mail.

More importantly, anyone is allowed to recategorize and reassign bugs.
If someone does so maliciously or incorrectly, you can always revert
it, and if someone is being truly malicious, you can always blacklist
that one person.  It this respect, it is far more wiki-like than
bugzilla, which has always been too much like a straightjacket.

It's not perfect, but it's better than bugzilla --- but then again,
just about *anything* would be better than bugzilla.  (Hmm, except
maybe SourceForge's very tragic bug tracking system... :-)

Of course, as Linus has said, it's not a complete solution --- you
still need humans to be smart about things --- but if the goal is to
make it easier to archive and track information about a bug, at
*least* with the Debian BTS, when you reply to an e-mail message, the
reply is automatically appended to the bug log!
	
						- Ted