Re: [PATCH v1 (RFC)] docs: discourage users from using bugzilla.kernel.org

[Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@leemhuis.info>]

Am 11.01.21 um 19:14 schrieb Randy Dunlap:
> On 1/10/21 4:10 AM, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> * About 66 of those ~200 components will assign bugs to email addresses
>>   that look valid, but 125 of them end with @kernel-bugs.osdl.org or
>>   @kernel-bugs.kernel.org. Those domains do not exist anymore, mails
>>   sent there bounce ('Unrouteable address'). It's possible that the
>>   server might be rewriting those domain names and nevertheless
>>   delivers new reports and comments by mails to some human; but it
>>   seems more like they never get mailed to anyone and thus just linger
>>   in the database; no wonder quite a few of bugs filed against such
>>   components never get a single reply (see below).
> 
> Those @kernel-bugs email addresses should not be a problem:
>   https://korg.docs.kernel.org/bugzilla.html#real-assignees-vs-virtual-assignees

Ahh, interesting, many many thx. Stupid me also forgot to put Konstantin
on the CC list (I had planned to do that, but forgot when I actually
sent the patch :-/ ), which likely would have pointed be there as well.

> AFAIK, USB bugs go to linux-usb@vger.kernel.org,

Those seem to use the approach the link above describes.

> SCSI bugs go to linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org.

That's one of the email address that are in the database for real, which
were mentioned in my patch description as 'looking valid':
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=IO%2FStorage

> netdev didn't want bugs sent there automatically IIRC, so a
> human takes care of doing that if warranted.

Ahh, good to know, it's really not obvious there are some humans working
there to that take care of this. That and all those bugs that never get
a reply look really like things are not working well.

> Andrew Morton takes MM bugs and Cc:s them to linux-mm mailing list
> and then asks for discussion to continue on the mailing list.

Then what use it bugzilla here? Wouldn't it be better for people to go
straight to the list?

> We

Who is "we"? We as in "the kernel community"? Or is there actually a
smaller group of people you are referring to which is actively
maintaining the list of products and components on bugzilla.kernel.org?

Just trying to understand things better here, as there are other things
that look strange to me and were mentioned in the patch description. For
example: Why are there only 200 products and components on
bugzilla.kernel.org (some of them for historic things like the
ac-kernels) while the MAINTAINERS file has more than 2200 entries?

> could/should probably see if we can add more project-specific
> mailing lists to the automatic reporting 

Guess that would mean taking to a lot of maintainers/mailing list admins
if they are okay with that. Who would do that?

> -- but probably not LKML.
> Otherwise some bug reports might never be heard about.

Yeah, agreed.

FWIW: I don't care too much about this whole thing, the whole idea for
the approach I'm currently driving forward started when I did regression
tracking in 2017. Back then I noticed quite a lot of bug reports on
bugzilla.kernel.org never got a single reply, even if they were good and
looked valid. That's why I brought this forward on the maintainers
summit (https://lwn.net/Articles/738216/ ) and there it was discussed to
basically go the route I'm taking currently. But I'm totally find to
adjust that route if there are good reasons, especially as that
discussion happened some time ago.

Ciao, Thorsten