[ubuntu-x] Xorg Triaging Projects

[Bryce Harrington]

Heya all,

First, thanks everyone who triages X bugs!  I'm noticing some new names
in the mail logs, which is awesome to see.  The Ubuntu-X bug reports
have noticeably improved in quality, and the team's responsiveness to
bug reports is much better than it once was.

For those looking for some straightforward triage work, there's a few
projects I've put on my own todo list as needing done, but that anyone
could do:


0.  Go through all Triaged bugs older than Hardy, and if no one has
    confirmed them on Hardy, ask if the problem still exists on Hardy.


1.  Look at all bugs marked fixed upstream.  If upstream provides or
    points to a patch, download the patch and attach it to our bug
    report.  This makes it easier to search for bugs-with-patches.


2.  WONTFIX all displayconfig-gtk bugs.  I talked with all the involved
    parties at UDS.  KDE wants to obsolete guidance-backends with KDE 4
    so won't be supporting the backend.  The maintainers of the frontend
    are not going to be doing any further development.  We pulled
    displayconfig-gtk out of the menus for Hardy, and will be removing
    it from main in Intrepid.  In talking with Timo, we will stop using
    it for bulletproof-X mode as well.  Thus, all bug reports can be
    closed as WONTFIX.  Here's a suggested bug response to use:

    [quote]
    Thank you for reporting this bug and for your efforts to make Ubuntu
    better.  As Xorg has improved this past year, an unfortunate side
    effect of these improvements is that it has rendered several design
    assumptions in displayconfig-gtk obsolete.  So, starting with Hardy
    we are no longer putting displayconfig-gtk forth as a primary
    configuration tool, and are putting our development focus into the
    Screen Resolution applet.  As a result, we do not plan to fix this
    bug and thus are closing it.

    For more background on this change, please see this page:
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/DisplayConfigGtk
    [/quote]


3.  Reduce number of bugs with many subscribers.  I track these at:

      http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Xorg/status_current.html

    Bugs with lots of subscribers tend to either be A) Bugs that are
    affecting a lot of people that deserve more attention, or B) Bugs
    with generic-sounding symptoms ("X crashes randomly", "X won't
    start") that lots of people have me-too'd themselves onto.

    The triaging task is to identify bugs that fall into the (B)
    classification, and that have become a "confirm storm".  Go through
    these and do the following:

    * Identify what the fundamental issue is    
    * Update the title
    * Update the description, including workarounds if any
    * Ask me-too'ers to file new bugs as appropriate
    * If the bug isn't filed upstream, do so
    * If the bug is fixed upstream, get some subscribers to test fix


If one of these projects sounds interesting to you, please have at it!
Of course, I'm happy to answer questions or provide assistance as you
need it for these or any Xorg triaging work, so don't hesistate to ask.


For Intrepid I have several specific triaging goals I hope we can
achieve:

A.  Reduce the number of xserver-xorg-video-ati bugs to <100, like we
    did for -intel during Hardy.

B.  For xorg, xorg-server, -ati, -intel, and -nv, reduce the number of
    bugs with >5 subscribers to 10 or fewer.  (I.e., make the
    status_current.html page all Green or Yellow).

C.  Get all Triaged bugs forwarded upstream.  (I.e., make the Xorg
    packages on this page all green:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+upstreamreport)

D.  Reduce the total number of all Xorg bugs from >1600 currently to
    <1000.


Bryce