[Development] issue tracker rights

[Mitch Curtis]

On Wednesday, February 06, 2013 12:52:29 PM Frederik Gladhorn wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> yesterday we did a bug triaging and fixing day here in the Digia Oslo
> office. While everyone always looks at the bugs a little bit, it is
> sometimes good to actually go through them and figure out if they are valid
> and their priority so we know what to work on.
> 
> Traditionally we have been rather protective of our issues, allowing people
> to file reports in jira, but not let anyone re-open or close them.
> I think it would be a good time to re-think our policies for bugs.
> 
> I would like to propose that everyone (with an account) gets the ability to
> create/close/re-open bugs. I don't think anyone will steal our bugs and run
> away with them. In addition one gets a notification for subscribed bugs, so
> it's easy to re-open a bug.
> 
> I am not sure what the best policy is about assigning priorities to bugs,
> should everyone be able to prioritize? Of course everyone has their bug as
> the most important thing in the world. We probably need to creat a good
> guideline for this on the wiki.

It would be nice to have a feature where this stuff could be requested rather 
than done immediately. The reason being that if a bug is mistakenly closed, it 
won't show up in the filters that we use for evaluating our bugs for each 
release. If a bug is mistakenly reopened, it's not so bad, but it still adds 
housekeeping overhead for whoever has to re-verify it, etc. Of course, someone 
will still have to respond to the requests; perhaps the reporter is notified 
upon requests to close and the reporter, assignee and user who closed the task 
when something is requested to reopened. There would still need to be someone 
who was notified regardless to account for the cases where the reporter is no 
longer active in the community.

> Another point is assignment. We have the default asignees, but these are
> often maintainers and in some areas they won't be able to fix all bugs.
> Probably everyone should be able to assign a bug to themselves at least
> when it is unassigned.
> I also think it's good to have unassigned bugs when no one will be working
> on them in the forseable future - those are up for grabs for everyone.

This I definitely agree with. There's very little disadvantage to giving 
everyone assignment rights (or at least the "Assign To Me" button); the only 
one I can think of is when someone is assigned a bug mistakenly. If someone 
"steals" a task (rarely happens anyway AFAIK), the previous assignee will be 
notified anyway.

> Bug triaging is a good way to get new contributors involved. So in my
> opinion we should try to encourage everyone to help out with the cleanup of
> our bug- tracker. Maybe we can even learn from KDE for example, where
> regular bug triaging is working nicely.
> (see for example http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad )

I think a lot of people are hesitant to contribute fixes because of all of the 
setup required to contribute, also (yeah, it's easy once you are familiar with 
it). This has probably been discussed before, but we would get way more fixes 
(or at least head starts for fixes, since most patches are not fit for immediate 
submission due to the absence of unit tests, etc.) if we could put a legal 
notice somewhere obvious saying that any attachments uploaded imply signing of 
the CLA?