Bug workflow - a wider view

[Jordan Mantha]

On Tue Jul 03, 2007 at 12:40:30PM +0200, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
<snip>
> I'd like to bring more focus on the overall process into our bug work as 
> well and the first step is to get a good overview of what we are doing 
> and what we need. I'd like to get feedback from both developers and bug 
> triagers on what procedures work for you and where the current 
> bottlenecks are. How can we make the process simpler and more uniform so 
> that more people will enjoy doing QA?
>

Well, at the risk of looking like an idiot I'll throw in a little bit here.
For me personally the biggest bottleneck or difficulty in doing Ubuntu QA
is dealing with upstream. Not really on a personal level, but we have
30,000+ open bugs and it seems to me a large majority of them aren't
Ubuntu-specific so they *should* be heading upstream.

My problem is that it's a real pain to push things upstream and then keep
track of them. It's one thing if you are looking after a particular few
packages and you are regularly going back and forth and doing follow up
upstream, but for MOTU (I think this also applies to Main a fair too) who
have to touch a lot of packages and most of the time just casually
(sponsoring an upload or doing a merge from Debian) it quickly gets
overwhelming dealing with all the various "upstreams" and their bug
tracking system and doing followup. Launchpad helps a little being able to
track some bugs upstream but somebody still has to file the bug upstream
and follow up there.

Overall it seems like maybe we are trying to do too much within
Ubuntu/Launchpad and maybe we need better methods of forwarding and working
with upstreams so that we can off-load work where it belongs.

Perhaps other people don't see this issue and I'm just not doing things
right, but that's my experience anyway.

-Jordan