Re: Planned changes for bugzilla.kernel.org to reduce the "Bugzilla blues"

Slade Watkins
2022-10-01T02:47:26Z

Hey there:

> On Sep 30, 2022, at 9:18 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 07:47:26PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>> Debian uses an email based bug tracker and you know what? Most people
>>> avoid it like a plague. It's a hell on earth to use. Ubunutu's Launchpad
>>> which looks and feels like Bugzilla is a hundred times more popular.
>>
>> It would be pretty sad if the only options we could come up with for bug
>> tracking would be either popular with reporters and ignored by
>> maintainers, or the other way around. Ideally we wouldn't have to decide
>> which of those two classes of users to prioritize, but I fear that,
>> given resource starvation, we'll have to make a decision there that will
>> be unpopular with one of the two sides.
>
> Funny thing. I've largely given up on getting any kind of useful bug
> report from Launchpad, so I've largely ignored it. In contast, the
> bug reports I get for e2fsprogs from Debian are generally far more
> actionable, with bug reports that have all of the data so I can
> actually root cause the problem, and help the user.

Yeah, this all comes down to personal preference and experience. For instance, that hasn’t been my experience and I happen to like Launchpad’s layout for reports, but I can see why you’d feel that way. (Different roles, different experiences, so-to-speak.)

> So Launchpad may be pretty, but perhaps because of selection bias, the
> bug reports I've seen there are generally a waste of my time, and if
> I'm going to choose which users I'm going to help for ***free***, it's
> going to be the one which is far less frustrating to me as the
> volunteer.

Yep, valid point there.

> "100 times more popular" is not necessarily a feature if what we get
> is 1000 times the noise.

I mean, I get it. And, obviously, something like Launchpad isn’t going to scale the way that it needs to in order for it to work for this.

Not everyone is going to like whatever solution is put in place, if there’s even any solution put in place: there will always be complaints from folks.

*Sigh.*

-srw