Bug Triage Privileges

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Monday 11 September 2006 1:27 am, Daniel Holbach wrote:
> > When I say "triage" I refer to setting the importance of a bug, which I
> > was sure until recently was the same thing.
>
> To triage is much more than that. Triaging a bug is
>       * making sure all information is available (version number, debug
>         backtrace, test case to reproduce, ...)
>       * make sure it's no duplicate
>       * the right people subscribed to it
>       * it's maybe forwarded upstream
>       * ...

I was likely thrown off by the default "untriaged" importance of bugs.  Maybe 
we could change this to a dash or something to prevent clashing nomenclature, 
but I'll file this on lp.

> >   When I found out that it was restricted to -qa
> > (and -dev and -core-dev), I inquired about getting membership in -qa and
> > was told that it was a very elite group.
>
> I'm not sure who told you that, but it's not true. For this group we
> make sure that team members are known as Bug Triagers already and know
> what they do.  Simon Law and I are Administrators of that team -
> although he set it up and I leave the task mostly to him and look after
> the 'bugsquad' team myself.
>
> It's useful to set a bug importance, sure - but my observation is that
> it takes a while until people stop seeing their bug as critical - which
> is not really useful.

The criteria for ubuntu membership include something like a sustained, 
significant contribution.  This leaves me still convinced that ubuntu members 
can be trusted with the importance of bugs.

> If we can improve the process, I'm all ears to how to do so.

I definitely have a suggestion.  If the temptation is for people to mark their 
own bugs as critical, let's narrow the scope of the restriction to that - 
until whatever criteria are met, users may not set the importance of their 
*own* bugs.  I've mentioned this before, and gotten the reply that sometimes, 
for some people, it's appropriate and useful for them to do that.  But those 
people are already able to do that.  For everyone else, who is already able 
to do (what I see as) much more destructive things to a bug than set 
incorrect importance, I think we could get maximum benefit with minimum abuse 
by allowing them to set the importance of other people's bugs.

Thanks,

Rocco Stanzione