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

Laurent Pinchart
2022-09-30T13:23:17Z

Hi Thorsten,

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 11:35:16AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 29.09.22 18:42, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 10:54:17AM -0400, Slade Watkins wrote:
> >>> On Sep 29, 2022, at 10:22 AM, Artem S. Tashkinov <aros@gmx.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I've mentioned several times already that mailing lists are _even worse_
> >>> in terms of reporting issues. Developers get emails and simply ignore
> >>> them (for a multitude of reasons).
> >>
> >> It’s 100% true that emails get _buried_ as waves of them come in (LKML
> >> itself gets hundreds upon hundreds a day, as I’m sure all of you know)
> >> and it just isn’t something I personally see as viable, especially for
> >> issues that may or may not be high priority.
> >
> > E-mails are not that bad to report issues, but they can't provide the
> > core feature that any bug tracker oughts to have: tracking. There's no
> > way, with the tools we have at the moment (including public-inbox, b4
> > and lei), to track the status of bug reports and fixes.
>
> Well, I'd disagree partially with that, as my regression tracking bot
> "regzbot"
> (https://gitlab.com/knurd42/regzbot/-/blob/main/docs/getting_started.md
> ; https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/regzbot/mainline/) does
> exactly does that: tracking, by connect the dots (e.g. monitoring
> replies to a report as well recording when patches are posted or
> committed that link to the report using Link: tags), while making sure
> nothing important is forgotten. But sure, it's still very rough and
> definitely not a full bug-tracker (my goal is/was to not create yet
> another one) and needs quite a bit of hand holding from my side. And I
> only use it for regressions and not for bugs (on purpose).

Patchwork does something similar for patches, and I agree that it would
be possible to use e-mail to manage and track bug reports with tools on
top (and don't worry, I'm not asking for regzbot to be turned into a bug
tracker :-)). It however has to rely on lots of heuristics at the
moment, as the data we exchange over e-mail is free-formed and lacks
structure. I've been dreaming of support for structured data in e-mails,
but that's a pipe dream really.

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart