Comments on Bugzilla

[Darren Tucker]

Hi All.

	I've been thinking about Bugzilla and there's a couple of things that
occur to me.

1) Bug status information.
	Bugzilla seems to have been designed on the assumption that a bug would
immediately be assigned to a module owner who would categorize, manage
then hopefully fix and close them.

	OpenSSH doesn't seem to work like that.  Bugs appear to be community
property (witness how many bugs remain assigned to "openssh-unix-dev"
and are updated by multiple people), however there are many fewer people
who can actually fix the bugs than people updating and/or managing the
bugs.

	It might be useful if there was an easy way for the core developers to
recognise that there is a fix attached to the bug to be reviewed and
applied or rejected (example: there has been an analysis and proposed
fix attached to bug #245 for nearly three months but it's still listed
as "NEW" and "critical").

	It might be useful if there was a "Proposed Fix" status (or use of
"Assigned" or something for that) for the bugs to make them
recognisable.  (I am hesitant to assign a bug to openssh-unix-dev since
I don't own that address or assign it to myself because it implies I
have the authority to fix it).

2) Notification email subjects.
	Currently Bugzilla sends email notifications with subjects like:
[Bug bugno] New: Subject of bug (for a new bug)
[Bug bugno] Subject of bug (for changes to bug)

	Additionally, if anyone replies to a notification, it normally appears
with "Re: " prepended.

	If you're trying to follow old discussions in the list archive it's
very difficult since the bugzilla notifications are not threaded.

	Would it be possible to have bugzilla generate subjects like:
[Bug bugno] Subject of bug (for a new bug)
Re: [Bug bugno]: Subject of bug (for changes to a bug)

	The list archives and threading mailreaders might be able to do a
better job of stringing them together.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG Fingerprint D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
    Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.