[rfc] bug targeting in Launchpad

[Martin Pool]

This change from Vincent made me think about just what precisely it
means when we target a bug to a release.

We commonly target a bug after it's fixed as a record of which release
included that fix.  That seems useful enough.

What about targeting bugs that are not yet fixed?  The main effect of
marking them is that they will come up in the milestone overview for
that release, eg <https://edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+milestone/1.16>, and
I think that page in turn is mostly useful for telling us:

 * what should I remember to work on soon
 * what needs attention but has nobody on it
 * are we ready to do the release?

The first two are a bit redundant with bugs assigned to you and in
progress, and with bugs of high or critical priority.  So I think
targeting mostly comes down to the last one: what needs to be done to
make the release, and does it need to slip?

Our releases are fairly strongly time-based but we do care about
fixing particular bugs for particular releases, typically because
they're serious regressions or they're needed to deliver what's
supposed to be the headline feature for that release.

Therefore I think we should target bugs to releases only when it's
something really critical to that release: we'd drop most other things
to get this fixed, and we'd at least seriously consider slipping the
release to put it in.  I think it's ok to have a bit of safety margin,
by marking things that _might_ be needed or we might change our mind,
but if we find we're regularly having bugs not hit the release they're
targeted to our targeting is not honest.

"I'd like to do this for 1.x" is not a good use of this marker.  If
you want to do it soon, assign it to yourself, and when you start mark
it in progress.

Probably the other place where it makes sense to target is when it's a
bug that's perhaps not critical, but it is almost done or in review or
trivial, and we want to make sure that the small amount of remaining
work does actually get done for this release.

[I'm not sure which category vila's bug below fits into and I'm not
saying he's wrong, just that it made me wonder why it was targeted.]

What do you think?




2009/6/11 Vincent Ladeuil <v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr>:
> ** Changed in: bzr
>   Importance: Undecided => Medium
>
> ** Changed in: bzr
>       Status: New => Confirmed
>
> ** Changed in: bzr
>    Milestone: None => 2.0
>
> ** Tags added: ftp
>
> --
> Broken permissions over FTP for .bzr/repository (and others)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/326543


-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>