dormant bugs and our perception

[Jon Stanley]

On Jan 2, 2008 2:25 PM, Elliot Lee <sopwith at gmail.com> wrote:

> > What we need is a leader.  Someone who wants to step up and say "we will
> > have Fedora bug days every Friday (or whatever) from this time to this
> > time, and I will be in #fedora-qa doing it myself, and teaching everyone
> > else who wants to learn."

Joined fedora-advisory-board late (after this was cross-posted from
fedora-marketing where I started the thread), so I'm not sure who
originally wrote this, but this is what I'm volunteering myself to do.
 Fedora is not $DAYJOB for me, and I can't spend much time on it
(depending on workload).  In the evenings and on weekends however,
sign me up!  I'll teach anyone who wants to know what I know, and hope
that others will do the same.

> I hink this is the heart of the problem (not the washing hair, the
> thankless work bit...) The only person I can recall who was ever a
> Rock Star Bug Triager was Kjartan Maraas for GNOME, and I think he did
> it out of dedication rather than sheer enjoyment, because he had the
> talent to work on a lot of other stuff as well.

Well, I'm not much of a developer (unless you count shell script-fu -
then I'm a ninja), however I think that I've got what it takes to
triage - an interest in doing it, time, and not really caring that
it's a thankless job - most of what we do is, but it does have an
impact.

> . Fix incentives. Maybe it means point system for rewarding people,
> maybe it means free FUDcon trips, maybe it means improved recognition,
> maybe it means hiring someone.

If it would help I was thinking of trying to make my way to FUDcon
Raleigh to further this cause - I think it may be premature, though.
I live in NYC, so airfare is cheap still.

> . Figure out what part of triaging /is/ enjoyable, and articulate it
> well in a call for contributors.

Hmm, good question - the good feeling that you're making a difference? :P

> . Divide & conquer. Maybe you can't get five people working steadily
> on bug triaging, but you might be able to get fifty Fedora
> contributors triaging one bug per person per week. If you could write
> a piece of infrastructure that decided which bugs needed triaging,
> it'd be easy enough to have that infrastructure send an e-mail out
> once a week to those fifty people ("Greg, Please triage bug #45678")
> and track who was actually doing their part. You may want to wash your
> hair on Fridays, but don't tell me you wouldn't be willing to triage
> one bug a week...?

I think we can use bugzilla here.  All bugs begin life in the NEW
state.  Perhaps if we just set them to ASSIGNED after triaging, and
alter the definition of that state, or maybe add a new state like
UNCONFIRMED like mozilla.org has.  Other suggestions welcome.