Some bugzilla work and thoughts

[Andrew Bartlett]

G'Day,

So some of you may have noticed I did a bugzilla spree today.

We have a problem.  There are 2400 or so open bugs across the Samba
products, and I managed to touch about 64 of them today in a meaningful
way, not just automated closing. 

The challenge is that while there are so many open bugs it is hard to
find where to start or feel like one in making progress, a bit like the
multiple pages of GitHub merge requests that built up before we
migrated away.

On an interesting note, while closing out up to 10 year old bugs may
seem pointless, I've found about 1/3 were still relevant in some way!

Dealing with just 2.5% of the bugs probably not the best way to spend
almost an entire day, but I was inspired because I got some honest
feedback recently that the sheer backlog discouraged the filing of new
bugs, because any new bug would just be a drop in the bucket. 

Of course I emphasised that we deal with new bugs with much more focus
than the backlog, but the point still stung a little. 

Many of our bugs are there because it is practice to file one 'in case
a backport is wanted' that never comes.  Because we have no link
between git, gitlab and bugzilla many never get even a tag as being
merged into master, except by manual intervention. 

Coupled with the fact that the patches themselves need to got to GitLab
(or in the past the mailing list) for merging is also a challenge, as
patch development doesn't happen here either. 

I offer no solutions, not even my normal engineering ones, just my
observations. 

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       https://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  https://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          
https://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba