Bugs

[James Westby]

Hi all,

As you probably saw from the bug mail I spent a bit of time
today going through some bug reports. I have a few comments
from this process.

Firstly, there are plenty of bug which have no importance set.
I think it's good to set importance wherever possible,
as this gives an indication of what someone thinks, and helps
to organise the bugs better in the large list we have.
I think it's clear that most of the ones that we have in
the Undecided state are Wishlist/Low/Medium, with most in
the latter two, but assigning it an importance would be good, partly
to leave the rest as a list of those that need some triaging
work. So, I'd like to ask that if you touch a bug you
have a guess at an importance.

Secondly, tags. We have a few tags for specific areas (hpss, ui, doc)
spring to mind, and it could be good to use them where appropriate.
We also have two tags to indicate that the bug would be easy to do,
"trivial" and "easy". I think using these would help us to create
a list of bug reports that would be good to attack if someone has
a spare twenty minutes, or for new contributors to start with. So,
again if you think that is the case please add the tag. I use "trivial"
for something that probably doesn't involve writing a new test, and easy
if I just think that it shouldn't be hard and won't require familiarity
with the guts of bzr, for instance a new command line switch.

Lastly, there were a few bugs that I touched that I didn't know what
to do with. They weren't something that I could confirm, or I didn't
want to take the time to do so, but they sounded like bugs rather than
user error. There may be something to be asked of the reporter, but I
don't know what that is. Should I just leave them in the "New" state,
or something else? I don't like just leaving them untouched.

I think everyone reads incoming bug reports and judges whether they are
worth some immediate attention, and so the ones that are left are
reasonably complete and probably low priority, but is there some way
we can capture that in the bug report? Would there be a benefit
to just replying thanking them for the bug report, possibly assigning
an importance?

Thanks,

James