Some bugzilla work and thoughts

[Anoop C S]

On Wed, 2019-06-12 at 00:05 +0200, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical
wrote:
> 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.

It would be good to have an indication regarding the release
version/tag to which a particular bug fix has gone through while it is
getting closed as RESOLVED+FIXED. We could either use a bugzilla
comment or built-in 'Fixed in version' field to mark the version/tag.

> 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