Cloning bugs: Just Don't Do It

[Adam Williamson]

You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with your cursor
hovering over it?

Don't do it! It's a trap.

Cloning a bug is almost never actually what you want to do. When you
clone a bug, all of the following are transferred to the new bug:

1. CCs
2. Description and comments, as one big ugly block as the new bug's
description
3. Pretty much all the metadata: whiteboard, keywords, tags,
dependencies. This includes stuff like blocker metadata, which is
almost never appropriate
4. External bug references
5. All sorts of other goddamn stuff

In my experience, you almost *never* actually wanted all of that.
Unless you really want a 2,000-line 'Description' which includes 50
comments and is entirely unreadable, everyone CCed on the old bug CCed
on the new bug, and all the metadata the same - just don't hit the
Clone button. Create a new bug and copy/paste anything relevant into
it.

In particular, Red Hat people, for the love of all that's holy, please
try not to clone Fedora bugs to RHEL unless it's really necessary! RHEL
bugs generate a metric assload of bureaucratic change emails that
Fedora contributors are almost never interested in. And no-one actually
likes trying to read those huge, unreadable clone bug Descriptions:
it's way, way nicer to create a new bug and cleanly summarize
whatever's actually relevant from the parent bug's description /
comments into the new one.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Kevin Fenzi]

+1000

Additionally, I find people clone bugs with the idea that some kind of
similar change/fix needs to be made in a different package. Don't do
that. It's often impossible to tell why the clone was even made or what
action the cloner is expecting (leading to several round trips back and
forth that would have been completely avoided if they just filed a new
bug with what they wanted in the first place). 

kevin

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com&gt; wrote:
>  +1000
>
>  Additionally, I find people clone bugs with the idea that some kind of
>  similar change/fix needs to be made in a different package. Don't do
>  that. It's often impossible to tell why the clone was even made or what
>  action the cloner is expecting (leading to several round trips back and
>  forth that would have been completely avoided if they just filed a new
>  bug with what they wanted in the first place). 
Fully agreed.

Can we investigate whether it is possible to disable the Clone
functionality in bugzilla for the Fedora product?

josh

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2015 11:37:34 -0500
Josh Boyer <jwboyer(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:

>  On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 11:36 AM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  > +1000
>  >
>  > Additionally, I find people clone bugs with the idea that some kind
>  > of similar change/fix needs to be made in a different package.
>  > Don't do that. It's often impossible to tell why the clone was even
>  > made or what action the cloner is expecting (leading to several
>  > round trips back and forth that would have been completely avoided
>  > if they just filed a new bug with what they wanted in the first
>  > place).  
>  
>  Fully agreed.
>  
>  Can we investigate whether it is possible to disable the Clone
>  functionality in bugzilla for the Fedora product? 
Sadly, I have asked, and they said it would be a significant amount of
work to do. ;( 

kevin

[Rich Megginson]

On 11/03/2015 09:13 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with
> your cursor
>  hovering over it?
>
>  Don't do it! It's a trap.
>
>  Cloning a bug is almost never actually what you want to do. When you
>  clone a bug, all of the following are transferred to the new bug:
>
>  1. CCs
>  2. Description and comments, as one big ugly block as the new bug's
>  description
>  3. Pretty much all the metadata: whiteboard, keywords, tags,
>  dependencies. This includes stuff like blocker metadata, which is
>  almost never appropriate
>  4. External bug references
>  5. All sorts of other goddamn stuff
>
>  In my experience, you almost *never* actually wanted all of that.
>  Unless you really want a 2,000-line 'Description' which includes 50
>  comments and is entirely unreadable, everyone CCed on the old bug CCed
>  on the new bug, and all the metadata the same - just don't hit the
>  Clone button. Create a new bug and copy/paste anything relevant into
>  it.
>
>  In particular, Red Hat people, for the love of all that's holy, please
>  try not to clone Fedora bugs to RHEL unless it's really necessary! RHEL
>  bugs generate a metric assload of bureaucratic change emails that
>  Fedora contributors are almost never interested in. And no-one actually
>  likes trying to read those huge, unreadable clone bug Descriptions:
>  it's way, way nicer to create a new bug and cleanly summarize
>  whatever's actually relevant from the parent bug's description /
>  comments into the new one. 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1277621

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2015-11-03 at 08:13 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with
> your
>  cursor
>  hovering over it?
>  
>  Don't do it! It's a trap. 
As long as the button exists, people will use it....

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 3 November 2015 at 16:13, Adam Williamson <adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with
> your cursor
>  hovering over it?
>
>  Don't do it! It's a trap.
>
>  Cloning a bug is almost never actually what you want to do. When you
>  clone a bug, all of the following are transferred to the new bug:
>
>  1. CCs
>  2. Description and comments, as one big ugly block as the new bug's
>  description
>  3. Pretty much all the metadata: whiteboard, keywords, tags,
>  dependencies. This includes stuff like blocker metadata, which is
>  almost never appropriate
>  4. External bug references
>  5. All sorts of other goddamn stuff
>
>  In my experience, you almost *never* actually wanted all of that.
>  Unless you really want a 2,000-line 'Description' which includes 50
>  comments and is entirely unreadable, everyone CCed on the old bug CCed
>  on the new bug, and all the metadata the same - just don't hit the
>  Clone button. Create a new bug and copy/paste anything relevant into
>  it. 
Mostly agreed. The one legit use-case though is when someone wants to
to continue a package submission after a review has gone dead due to
the original submitter vanishing. There's often useful information you
want to carry through to the  final review, but it's not possible to
take ownership of the bug (afaik).

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2015 18:25:32 +0000
Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Mostly agreed. The one legit use-case though is when someone wants
> to
>  to continue a package submission after a review has gone dead due to
>  the original submitter vanishing. There's often useful information you
>  want to carry through to the  final review, but it's not possible to
>  take ownership of the bug (afaik). 
Nope. In that case they should open a new review bug and close the old
one as a duplicate. 

Then anyone who wants to look at the old review can go look at it. 

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Policy_for_stalled_package_reviews?rd=Extr...

kevin

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 4 November 2015 at 14:31, Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Tue, 3 Nov 2015 18:25:32 +0000
>  Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>
> > Mostly agreed. The one legit use-case though is when someone wants to
> > to continue a package submission after a review has gone dead due to
> > the original submitter vanishing. There's often useful information you
> > want to carry through to the  final review, but it's not possible to
> > take ownership of the bug (afaik).
>
>  Nope. In that case they should open a new review bug and close the old
>  one as a duplicate.
>
>  Then anyone who wants to look at the old review can go look at it.
>
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Policy_for_stalled_package_reviews?rd=Extr...

Oh, OK. I stand corrected. Thanks :)