On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 3:06 PM Kamil Paral <kparal(a)redhat.com> wrote:
*I'd like to know how well it worked, in your opinion.*
I have mostly positive experience with the discussion tickets. It
definitely increased my participation during this cycle. Previously, I
mostly dealt with blockerbugs once per week on the IRC meeting, where I
needed to quickly skim each bugreport in order to form an opinion (of
course I could have prepared in advance, but... mostly I wasn't that
diligent in this area). With these tickets, I subscribed to the
blocker-review project and therefore was immediately notified after each
new blocker/FE proposal. So I spent some time on those bugs throughout the
whole week, had more time to read them, often helped debug them or add some
information and finally cast a vote whenever I felt ready. I spent more
time on blockerbugs overall, but I feel it contributed to the release
quality and smoother blocker process.
Those tickets shortened the regular IRC meeting considerably. For simple
issues, it feels much better to cast the votes async instead of waiting for
everyone at the meeting to speak up. Also I can vote whenever I want,
instead of being present at the meeting at a fixed time. For contentious
issues, the meetings still might have their use. It's easier to discuss our
different views in real-time instead of waiting hours or days for a
response in a ticket, and remember the context the whole time. Of course
the downside is that not everyone can be present. So keeping both channels
open might be beneficial for difficult discussions.
One thing I noticed is that sometimes people couldn't remember to keep the
discussion split between technical discussion and debugging (Bugzilla) and
voting (Pagure tickets). Occasionally people added debugging info into the
Pagure tickets. That means people only watching Bugzilla (e.g. maintainers
and developers) didn't see that info. I tried to remind people every time I
saw this, and hopefully this is only about habit. I admit that it's
sometimes not trivial to keep those two discussion topics separated, or not
forget about it. With just IRC discussions, we never really had this
problem.
In the future, I'd like to improve some automation regarding discussion
tickets maintenance. First, a ticket creation should automatically send a
comment to Bugzilla, so that the developer/package maintainer and anyone
watching knows about the discussion and can participate (we're fairly bad
about it at the moment). A it would also be nice to reduce the amount of
manual secretarialization needed after a vote is accepted - Bugzilla could
be ideally updated automatically with the correct flags.
Kamil