Re: Linux 2.6.21

Andi Kleen
2007-04-29T19:14:36Z

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 08:50:55PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 April 2007 19:37, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > My personal experience with bugzilla is that it's very unfriendly to
> > > reporters. IMHO it's suitable for tracking unresolved problems along with
> > > debug patches, system information etc., but not for _reporting_ new ones.
> >
> > What did you find unfriendly?
>
> - You are required to select a category and 'component' for your report, which
> often is difficult (especially if you're not a kernel expert)

Usually there is other and then someone else figures it out.

> - You need to have a bugzilla account (or to create one, if you don't)
> - If you want to add an address to the CC list, it must be known to bugzilla
> and there's no (obvious) way to check which addresses are known (bugzilla
> rejects the report if there's a 'wrong' email address in the list) [IMO this is
> really really broken.]

The Novell bugzilla actually has that fixed. You have a search email button
to look up addresses. Perhaps that feature will be ported someday into
the kernel.org one (I would like to have it too)

> - You are asked to provide many details that need not be relevant and casual
> reporters don't know that they can skip this part
> - Attaching files is tedious and referring to attachments unintuitive

Anyways that are mostly all detail (except the registration requirement) that
could be probably all easily fixed.

> And I think they are two _totally_ conceptually different things. You report
> a bug to let somebody know that there's a problem and this doesn't necessarily

The problem is we need a way to route those reports to the right people.
Routing it to a single person or broadcasting it just doesn't scale.
And the best way I know of is to use some database that keeps track of the state.

That is what bugzilla is essentially.

> For this reason there should be a simple means of filing initial bug reports
> with someone to look at them and forward them to appropriate people who will
> decide if the problem needs to be tracked. If they do, it's time to use
> bugzilla. Not earlier.

The only sane way to do that would be to save them somewhere and keep
a list and then let a group of people process them.

Hmm, wait... sounds like bugzilla, doesn't it?

> You are right, email is not suitable for tracking bugs. Still, it works quite
> well as a means of sending initial reports.

I disagree. It works small scale but does not really scale well.

-Andi