bugzilla bugzappers?

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 21:02 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Bert Desmet wrote:
> > hi!
> >
> > This is something I got in my mail box today.
> > As I don't have a valid answer for this, maybe someone else can answer for me?
> >
> > cheers, Bert
> >
> > the url of the blog of the guy: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/
> >
> > == the mail ==
> >
> > Dear Fedoracommunity,
> >
> > Over the course of the day I recieved 22^3 mails from your friendly Bug Zapper.
> > Most of those bugs where bugs I had reported upon crashes using
> > bug-buddy. Bugs on different desktop tools such as .. synergy,
> > evolution, gwibber , gnome-settings and probably some others
> >
> > I do understand that I development goes on and on .. and your fancy
> > devs don't care anymore about
> > bugs I reported on Fedora 12 as they are all hacking on Fedora 15.
> >
> > But what I don't get is that non of these bugs was ever touched,
> > they've been automatically created , and automatically closed
> >
> > <a href="http://tieguy.org/blog/2004/09/">Luis</a> already told us
> > ages ago .. that every project needs a bugmaster  apparently Fedora
> > replaced that bugmaster with a Bug Zapper.
> >
> > So can someone please explain my why I should continue to try to
> > improve Fedora by reporting bugs ?
> >
> 
> 
> Maybe it is time to discuss the usefulness of ABRT to Fedora. I think
> that it is a great idea for commercial products such as RHEL, but it
> obviously did not fit Fedora as is.
> 
> From what I have seen, the maintainers are more responsive to manually
> filed bugs than to ABRT filed bugs (Am I wrong?). Apparently the
> current setup is driving users (such as the person in the above email)
> away who are otherwise willing to report bugs. This is not good.
> 
> What can we do to make it better? Some ideas:
> 
> 1.
> - ABRT stops reporting new bugs to Fedora.
> - The user does a self evaluation: Is the bugcoding related, or
> packaging related?
> - If he thinks the bug is packaging related, or if he's not sure, he
> manually files a bug to Fedora bugzilla. Otherwise he notifies the
> developers.
> - The package maintainer asks for a backtrace
> - User reproduces the crash, and puts the bug number in ABRT gui. ABRT
> posts the backtrace to the bug report as an attachment.
> - If the bug is coding related, the package maintainer can direct the
> user to the developers.
> 
> 2.
> There can be a checkbox in pkgdb for maintainers to turn off ABRT bug
> reporting for their packages.
> 
> 3.
> ?

FWIW, I'll take this opportunity to send along a link to the triage
scripts I wrote for Python ABRT bugs:
http://people.fedoraproject.org/gitweb?p=dmalcolm/public_git/triage.git;a=tree

This is a mixture of generalized logic for parsing an incoming bug and
doing things with it, plus a bunch of python-specific heuristics based
on the reports that I'm seeing.  I'm sure it could be adapted/extended
by other package maintainers to cover the patterns of bug reports that
they receive.

I try to use this on all incoming bugs I receive, so that they've at
least had _some_ attention.  Though on busy days I'm afraid I do let
some things drop on the floor :(

Caveat: the GUI doesn't work yet.

Hope this is helpful
Dave