[Qemu-devel] Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Qemu-devel] Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Aurelien Jarno]

Hi all,

I would like to share some concerns about the bug tracker, as I am not
really sure it is really useful.

People are reporting bugs there (that's the purpose of a bug tracker!),
often with a patch or the beginning of a patch. In a lot of cases, the
bug reporters don't care about adding a Signed-off-by nor posting the
patch to the mailing list (which seems to be something that some of us
require), they think they have done their job reporting the bug. We
therefore arrive to a kind of deadlock situation where we know there is
a bug, but we are waiting eternally to get a patch posted the proper
way.

My other concern is that while the bug reports appear on the mailing
list, the patches only appear as a link to a web page.

In such situations I am not sure the bug tracker is really useful,
especially as it seems we are mostly ignoring bugs that are not
processed shortly after they have been reported.

Any opinion on that, and on how to fix that?

Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno	                        GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
aurelien@aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net

Re: [Qemu-devel] Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

Patches that are being submitted shouldn't go on the bug tracker.  I
have edited the QEMU wiki to make this clearer:
http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/ReportABug

Hopefully this will help first-time bug reporters put things in the right place.

You noticed bugs staying around forever on the bugtracker, I think
that's the right thing for a bug tracker to do.  If a bug exists then
it should live on the bug tracker until it gets fixed.

The real problem is that we're collecting bugs but not effectively
investigating and fixing them.  Can Launchpad send out automatic bug
summary emails once every week/two weeks/month?  That way we would get
a nudge on the mailing list that there are n open bugs left.  Right
now bugs come in on the mailing list and if they don't get attention
right away, they tend to get forgotten.

Stefan

Re: [Qemu-devel] Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:28 AM, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> wrote:
> Patches that are being submitted shouldn't go on the bug tracker.  I
> have edited the QEMU wiki to make this clearer:
> http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
> http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/ReportABug
>
> Hopefully this will help first-time bug reporters put things in the right place.

Anthony: Can you please add [[Contribute/SubmitAPatch|Submit a Patch]]
to http://wiki.qemu.org/MediaWiki:Sidebar?  "Report a Bug" already has
a top-level spot on the sidebar and I think we can make it clear there
is one and only one way to submit patches by adding this at the
top-level too.

Stefan

[Qemu-devel] Re: Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:28:46AM +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> The real problem is that we're collecting bugs but not effectively
> investigating and fixing them.  Can Launchpad send out automatic bug
> summary emails once every week/two weeks/month?

Launchpad is at least part of the problem. Users
find it without going through the wiki and
file Ubuntu/Debian specific bugs there.

A bugzilla on qemu.org or some such place would make people look at the
documentation to file, and preferably
would not be associated with a distro to avoid confusion.


-- 
MST

Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Usefulness of the bug tracker

[Jes Sorensen]

On 01/06/11 16:11, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:28:46AM +0000, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> The real problem is that we're collecting bugs but not effectively
>> investigating and fixing them.  Can Launchpad send out automatic bug
>> summary emails once every week/two weeks/month?
> 
> Launchpad is at least part of the problem. Users
> find it without going through the wiki and
> file Ubuntu/Debian specific bugs there.

It is definitely a problem that a large part of the people who submit
bugs in Launchpad take it for granted that it is for Ubuntu/Debian. I
would quite welcome a tracker on qemu.org

I am still trying to get rid of all the bugs in the sourceforge tracker,
and move over the ones that we need to keep, but I could use some help.

Cheers,
Jes