On 18/09/2007, Richi Plana <myfedora@richip.dhs.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 10:59 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > The bug was filed on 2007-06-08 (over 3 months ago) by J H Ettle and
> > added my +1 to it on 2007-08-29.  Is Alexander missing?  Is there a
> > co-maintainer who should be available?
>
> I don't know what help a co-maintainer for fedora would do. What we need
> are more people to look at bugs, come up with patches that fix them and
> post them upstream, where I can review and commit them. This will then
> instantly come back to fedora (beacuse we track upstream closely).
>
> Unfortunately, not many people seem interested in doing this work. :(

Either that or bugzilla needs a better way to allocate tasks.

Having worked as a software developer for quite some time, I know how
many developers would rather just work on a problem rather than try to
validate bug reports and gather missing information. Personally, I would
rather work on bugs that either interest me really well, or are provided
in a format that allows me to work on the problem immediately.

Unfortunately, qualifying bug reports (finding dupes, going back to the
reporter for missing information) can only be done by people who know
exactly what real problems are and what's needed to resolve them.

This is simply untrue. I am currently about halfway through a bug triage of all Fedora 7 kernel bugs and am doing so solely on the basis of one page from the wiki which the kernel team put together. I know nothing of kernel code but I do know having had a few pointers from people in the know what information to request under what circumstances. If I can do that for the kernel I'm sure the same goes for any application.

I know this is something that requires discipline and structure ...
something that doesn't always go hand-in-hand with the nature of
volunteer work, but it's something that has to be addressed in order for
bugs to be proactively addressed (rather than wait for someone to bring
it up on a mailing list). As FOSS endeavors grow (and the number of
users increase), there's got to be ways to improve on volunteer
bug-fixing.

Any ideas?

I've always wondered if the assignment of tasks can be round-robin'd (or
pick some better way of scheduling tasks that's completely and really
fair, ;) ) assuming we had a couple of more volunteers.

I think you just need to dive right into bugzilla and whatever component interests you then start with that. Bug triage is quite rewarding and people actually feel a little loved. Surely there is nothing like the hurt and pain of an un-answered bug report?

Cheers
Chris

--
http://www.chruz.com