Re: bug tracking

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Mar-2010, Przemek Klosowski wrote:

| Would it work to use an existing Bugzilla, e.g. Fedora's? It is already 
| set up and maintained, and it has a significant infrastructure built 
| around it, admittedly centered around Fedora/RPM.

Yes, I suppose it could work.  I would be happy to have someone else
maintain the bug reporting infrastructure.  I don't really want that
job, and there are probably a lot more useful things I could do for
Octave other than babysit a bug tracker.

| For instance, Fedora has the ABRT (automatic bug reporting tool) that 
| kicks in on application crash and guides people through the bug 
| submission process: downloads debugging symbols if they aren't installed 
| already, formats stack trace and gathers related info, and submits it to 
| Bugzilla. I think that's how things like Firefox get most of their bug 
| reports; it is of course both blessing and a curse, but overall a good 
| thing, I believe. After the bug report stage, there's also a QA/update 
| process (koji/bodhi) that helps package maintainers in pushing updated 
| packages out to users.

Although (semi-)automatic bug reports for crashes could be helpful, I
think the majority of our bug reports are about things other than
segfaults.

| Since you are the upstream of the process, you must have talked to
| the package maintainers (alexlan, jussilehtola, mmahut and rakesh)
| who watch the bugzilla, and can handle patching and rebuilding on the 
| Fedora side. As of now, they have 86 reports for octave, most of them 
| closed:
| 
| https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=octave

I actually did not know who was packaging Octave for Fedora now.  Do
any of the maintainers of the Octave package for Fedora participate on
the Octave mailing lists?  If so, they haven't done so in a way that
makes me aware that they are the Fedora package maintainers.

I also see a number of bugs reported there that are not about
packaging issues.  I think it would be best if package maintainers
always sent bug reports to us when they are bugs in Octave rather than
packaging.

jwe