From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752875AbXD1X3o (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:29:44 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753201AbXD1X3n (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:29:43 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([65.172.181.25]:33641 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752875AbXD1X3m (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:29:42 -0400 Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:29:21 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Adrian Bunk cc: Diego Calleja , Chuck Ebbert , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.21 In-Reply-To: <20070428224904.GE3468@stusta.de> Message-ID: References: <20070426040806.GJ3468@stusta.de> <20070426125802.GL3468@stusta.de> <4630DB24.4030005@redhat.com> <20070426201325.8a1ebda3.diegocg@gmail.com> <20070426224148.69b91b2e.diegocg@gmail.com> <20070428195320.GZ3468@stusta.de> <20070428202701.GA30343@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> <20070428224904.GE3468@stusta.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > That's exactly where Linus' "drop any bug reports that are more than a > week old" suggestion is completely flawed - no matter what the submitter > does, how often he tests latest kernels, noone will help him. You talk, but what do you actually *suggest*? Talk is cheap. You use to do the walk too, but you've already said that you're not interested in that any more. So excuse me if I'm not impressed. The thing is, bugzilla is totally broken because it's designed to help track bugs, but it's *not* designed to actually handle the much harder problem, which is to actually get the *right* developers to be aware of the *right* bugs! And both of those "right"s are important. Spamming everybody will just mean that everybody tunes them out. And spamming even the right developers with useless bugreports will also just cause them to tune out the good ones. The thing is, the "tracking bugs" part that bugzilla _can_ do is also totally _useless_ without that much more important phase, namely the "connect the parties". That's what you really used to do. You made developers connect to the reports, because your reports were _useful_ and not overly noisy. But go back and look - did you notice that once you connect the dots, it turns out that bugzilla itself isn't all that wonderful. Quite a lot of your regression reports had other ways of pointing to the problems, including very much mailing list archive pointers etc! So bugzilla isn't actually all it's touted to be even _once_ the connection between reporter and developer has been established. I really don't see why you are so hung up about bugzilla, when your own regression reports didn't generally point to it all that often! (I just went back and double-checked: you had more than twice as many pointers to kernel mailing list archives than you had pointers to bugzilla in the one series I looked at. And I'm _not_ saying that's wrong at all: I think the mailing list is actually likely to be at LEAST as useful as bugzilla is as a bug-tracker!) And bugzilla actually falls down even more than the mailing list does for the whole (and MUCH MORE IMPORTANT!) phase of connecting developers to bug reports. And THAT is really the problem here. And no, I don't actually think that automatically closing entries that haven't gotten any attention in the last two weeks would "fix" bugzilla. But I think that it might actually make people (a) more likely to look into bugzilla (and thus maybe improve the "connecting" developers/reporters thing) (b) act as a trivial noise-removal thing, because it would give preferential treatment to people who are diligent about their bug-reports and are willing to follow up on them and it would also remove the noise that comes from obvious things that broke and got fixed. But I think the real fix is to have real humans that help de-noisify the bug reports. Let's call them the "bunk" group, just to pick a random four-letter combination. The kinds of people who help turn the mindless noise that is bugzilla (and the kernel mailing list) into directed _information_. No, nothing is ever going to be perfect. And "filtering" the noise will inevitably also end up dropping real information. But not filtering it will guarantee that even more is dropped. Linus