Bugzilla

Colin Scott gnucash at double-bars.net
Mon Oct 3 14:23:00 EDT 2011


At last count, there were 279 unconfirmed bug reports in Bugzilla, some of them dating back to 2008!  I infer from this that there is an even larger number of unresolved bugs, dating back even further.

Whilst accepting the inevitability of  a proportion bug reports being invalid (duplicates of other reports, or just plain mistaken!) there will certainly be a very large residue of valid but unconfirmed reports.

At the moment, reporting bugs on Bugzilla can  be a bit like dropping the reports into a black hole - too frequently one has no idea whether the report has been ignored, or considered trivial, or even not read at all.  It seems to me that at the very least, anyone reporting a bug should receive:

* an acknowledgement of the bug report by return email.  Currently I believe there is no immediate email acknowledgment of bug reports.

* an acknowledgement that the bug has been read and triaged and notification of the triage result (within, say, 2-4 days).  (Triage is essentially the process, taking the report at face value, of setting a priority for investigating the report somewhere in the range from "immediate" through to "ignore"

At the moment there is in too many cases no indication at all even that the bugs have been read, which discourages users from making bug reports.  Worse, a user who reports a bug will usually hope that his report will be acted upon within some reasonable timescale, and if that is not to happen then he needs to be informed, so he can decide whether or not he can live with the reported bug until it gets fixed (assuming it ever does!)

This little diatribe is the result, in case you haven't guessed, of sending some bug reports in the black hole that is bugzilla!

Colin


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list