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Re: [Xen-devel] [Xen-users] xen forum



On 05/24/2013 10:36 PM, Stefano Stabellini wrote:

It would be easier for us if the bug reports and such were posted on
xen-devel.
Please consult http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
when
doing it.



My own experience is that posts (at least from me) are regularly
missed/ignored on the devel list, including a signed patch, so I
personally think a bug tracker would be a better option. Bug trackers
don't (or at least shouldn't :) ) forget or miss. That's they're raison
d'etre. I honestly don't know how anyone can do business using this
list, but that's just my humble opinion.

Did you also look in the MAINTAINERS file to make sure you copied the
right
maintainer?

The reason for skipping the Bugzilla system is that it is soo out of date
that
we don't use it anymore.


Actually I recall there is a secondary reason too - which is that we get
copied
on distros bugs that affect Xen. For example in Fedora I (and Dariof) get
copied on
any Linux kernel issues that are related to Xen. In Debian I believe Ian
Campbell
gets copied as well. For SuSE it is Jan and Olaf. Not sure about the other
distros.

And then if you use Oracle Linux, I get copied too. Then there is the
internal bug system
if you using OVM and the Linux kernel bug-system where I get copied too.

That is a lot of bug systems to keep track of - and since most of the users
use a
distro they end up using their distro bug-system. And then Xen's bugzilla
system
became less and less important to keep track of stuff.

Oh, and there are the five mailing lists and the fire-hose LKML. Yuck, soo
many emails.

Surely the sensible thing to do is to have one Xen bug tracking system and
only use that. If distro maintainers wish to file bugs in the Xen bug tracker
for Xen bugs, they are free to do so, same as any other user. Xen is the
upstream project - Xen bugs should be fed from distros up to Xen, not the
other way around. Xen bugs are then tracked with the single Xen bug tracker
and they are all in one place, searchable reviewable and easy to keep track
of. Is this not obvious? Am I missing missing an issue that has been
too-subtly implied but not explicitly stated?

In an ideal world maybe. What usually happens is that distros keep using
their bug trackers and keep recommending their users to fill bug to
them. These bug trackers get out of sync with the upstream bug tracker.

That's distro problem, not a Xen problem, and should not be expected to be a Xen problem, nor should it ever become a Xen problem.

Moreover some people don't use bug trackers and submit bugs as emails
anyway, as a consequence the bug tracker usually needs to be kept
up-to-date manually by one or more members of the community.

So stop accepting emailed bug reports. If somebody emails one, tell them to create a bugzilla account and file it there. If that is too hard, they clearly don't care about the bug enough. It's no better or worse a filtering system than seeing who is going to bother bumping an email thread if it gets missed.

In the long run they tend to be "left behind".
In Linux it has been tried several times to introduce bug trackers,
most of the times failing completely.

My preferred Linux distribution uses a bugzilla bug tracker and it works very well indeed.

It is mostly FIFO with the 'oh wow, this needs to be fixed NOW!' preempting
it.
In all honestly it sucks as a track system, but I am not really sure of how
else to do this
without spending a massive time doing 'click here on this button and add
this comment,
set dependency on this bug' and instead concentrate my time in an editor.

I believe we need something that can bridge both of these - helping
developers to
know about bugs and also track them so users know that things are done and
not ignored.
And so low maintaince for developers that they can focus on looking at code
all day.

I don't think this is a new problem, and I do think the problem has been
solved many times and solved well. If there is an obvious flaw in what I said
above, please do point it out. But claiming that a broadcast system is bad and
therefore ignoring a single-point tracking system is the way forward is as
much of a contradiction in terms as I can imagine on this subject.

It is not a new problem but it has never been solved properly, just give
a look at the status of bug trackers in the linux kernel to get an idea.
Lunchpad was supposed to be the bug tracker to rule them all, but it
ended up being just one more bug tracker.

It works just fine for RH and Fedora. So clearly the problem must be in something else.

That said, I don't mean that it's all hopeless and doomed, you certainly
raised some good points and I think we have room for improvement.
It's just not as simple as it seems.
Personally I am in favor of introducing a bug tracker if we have a way
to integrate it into our current process and make sure it's kept up to
date.

I sincerely hope it happens.

Gordan

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