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

Artem S. Tashkinov
2022-10-02T19:56:20Z

On 10/2/22 17:57, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 02, 2022 at 12:49:04PM +0000, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote:
>> The current ill-maintained semi-functional bugzilla has proven to be a
>> ton more useful than random mailing lists no sane person can keep track
>> of. Bug "reports", i.e. random emails are neglected and forgotten. LKML
>> is the worst of them probably.
>
> You seem to completely miss the point. There's no need for *someone* to
> keep track of the whole mailing lists, these mailing lists are used daily
> by thousands of people. It's a *collective* effort. What matters is that
> there exists someone among these people who will deal with your request.
> Do patches fall through the cracks ? Sure! And so what ? The important
> ones are eventually noticed or resent, and there's no harm in sending a
> "ping" once in a while. Actually I find bug trackers worse for this,
> because they give the reporter the impression that their report is being
> handled while many times there's noone reading at the other end due to
> the amount of stuff that has to be triaged. With mailing lists, a sender
> who gets no response starts to wonder whether anything wrong happened and
> is more naturally going to ask if the message was properly received, thus
> reviving it. It's extremely rare that nobody responds to a retry on a first
> message.

I've given multiple reasons why mailing lists more often than not do not
work at all, I won't repeat them again.

You can open LKML right now and check all the unreplied emails where
people complain about various issues. There are tons of such messages.

>
>> As I've said many times already: bugzilla must be an opt-out, not opt-in
>> experience/option.
>
> That's the best way to make sure those who feel annoyed by this spam will
> just redirect the bug tracker's address to /dev/null and will never ever
> receive any message from it anymore. That's quite a common pattern, I'm
> surprised that it's even still proposed as a solution...

Great, it's a single action which takes at most a minute. Why are people
creating a drama out of it I've no idea.

>
>> Let's subscribe the past six months of developers using git commits and
>> if someone doesn't like getting emails they go to the website and
>> unsubscribe _once_ which takes a minute. This is a non-issue I've no
>> clue why we're dwelling on it.
>
> Maybe because you have not yourself been spammed by bots that each
> require a different way to unsubscribe/unregister/reconfigure options ?

There's just one bugzilla. We are not talking about many bugzillas yet.

>
>> Let's operate with some examples:
>>
>> Bugzilla gets around two dozen bug reports weekly which encompass at
>> most thirty emails, which equals to four emails daily on average.
>
> That's roughly what I was getting from github when I disabled all
> notifications.
>
>> LKML alone sees up to a hundred emails _daily_.
>
> With a difference that these ones are not necessarily *read*, they're
> *scanned* by many of us before being archived via a single- or two-key
> shortcut, with a particular focus only on some messages or series
> (hence the importance of a good subject).

The problem is today you're scanning it, tomorrow you don't feel like
it. An email gets lost, a problem is never addressed.

Again most bug reports sent to LKML are completely neglected, and it's
_not_ limited to LKML.

Looks like that's what people here are advocating for. "We are not paid
to deal with bug reports, so we prefer not to even hear about them".

OK, let it be, let's deprecate bugzilla.

Regards,
Artem