Incomplete with no response >30 days

Wolfger wolfger at gmail.com
Tue May 27 11:01:13 BST 2008


On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:55 AM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Wolfger <wolfger at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>>> So a pretty please with sugar on the top: If you don't understand what a
>>> bug is about, please do not touch it. This includes all what is recently
>>> called a "workflow bug".
>>
>> This is a pointless request, since it requires the person looking at
>> the bug to understand that he doesn't understand. People who think
>> they understand (but don't) are far more damaging than people who know
>> they don't understand.
>
> I fully agree with your rationale, but not why my request should be
> pointless.

The current case in point: This thread arose because I touched a
workflow bug when I shouldn't have. In theory, your request would have
stopped me (I didn't understand, so I shouldn't have touched it), but
in reality your request does not stop me, because:
a) I didn't know (and still really don't, aside from bdmurray's
greasemonkey script) how to tell a workflow bug from a regular bug
b) I didn't know (but now do) that the rules are different for
workflow bugs than non-workflow bugs
So your request does nothing to stop somebody from touching something
they don't understand, if they think they understand it. Understand?

>>> Developers don't need a group of people malicously editing their bugs,
>>
>> Ubuntu does not need people maliciously sowing dissent in the ranks of
>> the volunteers who work very hard to help Ubuntu. If you have evidence
>> that "a group of people" are "maliciously" editing bugs, then please
>> present that evidence so we can deal with these people.
>
> Leaving out the most important sentence of my mail is not going to help
> a productive conversation.

Well, I went back and re-read that entire paragraph (all two sentences
of it), and did not see anything mitigating the accusation that some
nameless group is being malicious. Please help me out and tell me what
the most important sentence is.

>> When a procedure is documented but not followed (or when a procedure
>> is changed but the documentation isn't) is when problems like this
>> entire thread arise.
>
> I think this thread arose for a couple of reasons:
>  - it was not propoerly communicated with the developers (and still is
>   not. I don't consider this discussion as communication with the
>   developers since it is on the wrong list, not every developer is
>   required to read this.
>  - Observations that people persumably members of the bugsquad have
>   confused developers with changes to bugstatus
>  - Big confusion on the developer side (at least it was for me)

Funny that you see this thread arose for 3 developer-centric reason,
when the thread was started on a non-dev list by a non-dev. Perhaps
these are reasons why the thread grew as large as it did, but
(speaking as the person who started the thread) the thread arose
because:
1) There was no easy way to tell one specific (and small) subcategory
of bugs apart from the main
2) The subcategory has special rules and does not follow the
"standard" rules for status.
3) The dev who owned the bug (but did not assign it to himself) got
rather snippy with me when I touched it.

Since then, I've encountered another subcategory of bugs that don't
adhere to the standard rules (Mozilla), and the dev responding to me
there was rather more helpful, and pointed me to a wiki entry for how
to treat Mozilla bugs. Unfortunately I found issue there, too, since
the bugs were not being handled in accordance with the Mozilla
procedure, either. The procedure listed there was that an incomplete
bug *must* have a tag indicating why it is incomplete, but the bugs I
was touching were not so tagged.

So really it all boils down to the need for better documentation of
procedure, better adherence to procedure, and possibly a need for
better procedures. We're all on the same team here, and I think some
people (on both sides) are getting a little heated and forgetting
this.


-- 
Wolfger
http://wolfger.wordpress.com/



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