Xen project Mailing List

Hi all,

I wanted to step in here and give some extra context, as in fact some of this has been discussed at last week's Hackathon and also before. The thread is mixing a few different questions:

a) A better place for user questions than mail: aka the forum vs. mail discussion

b) How to better track bugs (including the role of http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/)

c) The specific state of patches for for Xen patches - that should be discussed elsewhere

On a):

As part of the new xenproject.org website we created http://xenproject.org/help/questions-and-answers.html

Right now xenproject.org is in beta, and we are resolving some issues with sign-up (a sizable proportion of new site members never get their activation mails). We decided to go for a stackoverflow like Q&A system with tags, instead of a forum. That should make user questions more easily searchable due to the extra structure that Q&A systems provide and the tagging. You just need to start using it. I was first thinking of migrating content to the new system, but we have too much historical data and it would not benefit from the tagging.

However, this system is not intended for bugs.

On b):

Exactly the question of bugs, bugs getting lost and bug trackers was discussed at some length at the Xen Hackathon last week. The official policy is http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs_against_Xen and has been for years. Doing bugs this way, puts a burden on the user to keep on top of their bugs (and re-send after a few months if it is sitting there). The assumption is that if you don't do this "your bug is not important enough".

Now, I raised the issue of tracking bugs better with the Xen developers many times. As it turns out in the Xen dev community the VAST majority of maintainers prefer bugs to be raised via the dev list. In contrast in the kernel dev community both raising bugs via the dev list and bugzilla.kernel.org are official: you have to know which maintainer prefers which mechanism - if you don't know and use the wrong one, your bug is simpply ignored.

Anyway, Ian Campbell developed an e-mail based bug tracking system which is being trialed in the Xen community right now. I can't find the mail thread for it (I am suffering from not being able to find what I know is there). But the basic principle is that by adding a special e-mail address to a thread, means the bug gets tracked and that there is a simple web interface that creates lists of bugs (and conversations around them). There is also a simple (e-mail) way to mark bugs as closed. That creates some new opportunities, but also challenges for the dev community which have to be resolved.

I wrote down notes re the Hackathon discussion, but am waiting for additional notes from others, which I will post later this week on xen-devel.

> I'm guessing there is no longer a relevant bugzilla, then? http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/

This system was never really the official Xen bug-tracker (or has not been for a very long time). It was created for one large vendors in the contributor community which needed a bug tracker for their internal purposes. Which is why we do not promote bugzilla. Typically, that vendor will keep bugs in bugzilla but also send to xen-devel. I just played with this, and we have an SEO issue:

- if you search for "xen bugs" you get to the right page (aka http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs_against_Xen)

- if you search for "xen bugzilla" you get to http://bugzilla.xensource.com/bugzilla/ (that is fine, but the bugzilla doesn't tell you NOT to use it and does not point you to http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs_against_Xen)

This creates confusion.

I will look into this and see what can be done.

Regards

Lars

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 6:56 PM, jacek burghardt <jaceksburghardt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

May be you are correct but i believe that the volume of emails makes difficult to find info you looking for. Forum you can post stickies and users can help each other fix bugs. If user a states that they have this issue with xen and user b had same issue and found a patch and posts info about it that will make easy for rest of user to download and install patch. It very hard to search mailing list. xen vga pass info is interesting also there lots of info about and many patches but main website with patches is down. I posted patches for xen 4.3 i hope somone can provide patches for xen 4.2

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