Low bug triage activity all around

[Thomas Ward]

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Omer Akram <om26er at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> That may be a factor but I have seen closely no activity in #ubuntu-bugs for
> a while which is not good

In the time since i started lurking there, there's been a decent bit
of activity.  From my observations (and courtesy of a
very-long-and-time-consuming grep on over 500MB of log files for
freenode), your username (om26er) is not in the channel 24/7, thereby
your username is not usually active in the channel if/when there's
activity.  I've witnessed a substantial (not huge amount, but still
substantial) quantity of activity related to bugs, or related to bug
documentation, or related to bugsquad bug handling things, in
#ubuntu-bugs, whether initiated by bugsquad, or initiated by a bug
control member, or initiated by a member of some other team.  There's
sufficient activity in the channel to qualify it as "active".  It is
true, the past month or so there's little or no activity, however
there is still sufficient activity there that its "active".  But,
remember, it IS the holidays right now, so there's bound to be less
activity.

Usually, bug work tends to drag me out of #ubuntu-bugs and into other
channels, such as #kubuntu or #lubuntu or #ubuntuforums or #ubuntu or
others.  So while #ubuntu-bugs is not always active, there is triaging
going on behind the scenes.  Not all Ubuntuers use IRC, and those that
do usually get forwarded to the bugsquad channel where applicable.
But BugSquad isn't limited to just that channel.  They're all over the
place: they're on QA, they're on developers, they're on Ubuntu+1,
they're on MOTU, they're on the Server Team ... i could go on with
that list but I won't, because the list is extremely extensive.

>>
>>I'm also seeing signs there are a few of the regulars who've tried
>>Raring on their machine and find it's failed very early on in the kernel
>>and haven't been able to find a working solution to carry on, and have
>>just gone and ignored it for the moment.
>
>
>then I am lucky raring works just fine for me just few glitches here and there but thats expected at this stage i guess.

While BugSquaders should indeed be on the latest dev release (or at
the very least have a VM with it), not all of us do.  I personally do
not because my primary work on Bugs drags me to server packages in
Quantal and Precise, and because I don't have a system that can run
Raring or Raring in a VM without technical troubles.  I also have old
testing systems I usually install the latest dev release to at some
point, but the kernel doesn't have drivers for the hardware in those
systems, so Raring doesn't work  (these're OLD systems).

>> I have been involved in bug triage for a while in Ubuntu and it seems this
>> scene is not that active it used to be although alot of great folks from
>> our community are highly devoted.

Okay, I know i'm digging up logs somewhat far back in the email chain
about this, but a lot of triaging happens behind-the-scenes.  And its
not just Bug Squad that does the triaging.  Most server packages were
shunted off to the Server Team a while ago, and I can guarantee you
there is extremely high activity levels for triaging those.  I've been
one of those people, at least with certain packages.  Usually I don't
do desktop triaging work, short of filing bugs.

------

Okay, enough with me responding to you, Omer.  As for suggestions, I
agree with David that we need another round of patch triaging.
There's a ton of patches that have gone unprocessed / unchecked.  But
as David said, these patches won't make it into Debian for a while,
especially since they're under a freeze.

As for the rest of my suggestions, we should probably start looking at
Universe packages for a while.  There's a lot of bugs in universe
packages that have not been fixed, nor sent up to Debian, nor sent
upstream.  As well, there's also packages that have not been updated
in years which suggests that there's not been any work done on those
packages, upstream or otherwise.  We may want to coordinate with MOTU
and start figuring out which Universe packages are no longer
maintained in Debian or otherwise, and perhaps work with the Security
team to see whether security bugs in Universe packages are causing
substantial security holes, and work to patch, or find patches, for
those packages.


Just my two cents on this matter :)

------
Thomas Ward
Ubuntu Member
Ubuntu BugSquader