[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] [RFC] LLVM bug lifecycle BoF - triaging

[Kristof Beyls via cfe-dev]

On 26 Oct 2018, at 16:25, Kristof Beyls via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:



On 26 Oct 2018, at 04:26, Richard Smith <richard at metafoo.co.uk<mailto:richard at metafoo.co.uk>> wrote:

On Thu, 25 Oct 2018 at 05:10, Kristof Beyls via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org>> wrote:
On 5 Oct 2018, at 07:04, Dean Michael Berris <dean.berris at gmail.com<mailto:dean.berris at gmail.com>> wrote:

Thank you for starting this conversation! I look forward to the results of the BoF discussion summarised as well.

Dean, all,

There was a lively discussion at the BoF; we’ve tried to take notes at https://etherpad.net/p/LLVMBugLifeCycleBoF but probably have failed to capture all the points. The slides used to kick start the discussion can be found at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ERB9IQAjSwaNpEnlbchQzd_V9IQlLOojgo9J0_NXvYA/edit

Both at the BoF and in the mail thread, there have been many suggestions for improvements. So many that if we’d want to introduce all of them at once, we’d probably get stuck and not introduce any. To try and make progress on the ones I myself feel are most useful, I’ve volunteered for 2 actions:

1. Write up a proposal for documentation on what to do during bug triaging/closing/etc. I’ve just done so and put it up for review at https://reviews.llvm.org/D53691.
2. Write an email to the mailing lists to ask for volunteers for being on the “default-cc” list for components, implying you’re willing to triage bugs reported against those components. I’ve decided to first try and get consensus on what is expected when triaging a bug (see point above) before actively searching for volunteers for all components. That being said, both at the dev meeting and in the days after, I already received many requests from people to be added to the default-cc list for specific components. Of course, I’m very happy to add people volunteering to default-cc lists, so if you don’t want to wait to get added to a default-cc list, please email bugs-admin at lists.llvm.org<mailto:bugs-admin at lists.llvm.org> or raise it as a ticket in bugs.llvm.org<http://bugs.llvm.org/> under “Bugzilla Admin”/“Products”.

Furthermore, since the BoF, I’ve seen a quite a few requests to clean up and introduce new components in Bugzilla. We’ve implemented the changes quickly and will aim to continue to have a quick response time in the future. Please file a ticket in bugs.llvm.org<http://bugs.llvm.org/> under “Bugzilla Admin”/“Products” if you want to request a specific change.

For most of the other points that were raised: I don’t currently plan on acting on them immediately myself and hope to first see an impact of the above actions.

In the original post, there was a suggestion to bring back the "UNCONFIRMED" status. I think that'd be a great idea, as it both makes it easy to search for untriaged bugs and to give feedback to a reporter that their bug is real and acknowledged. Is that planned?

I hadn’t seen too much feedback on the idea for introducing (reintroducing?) the “UNCONFIRMED” status, so hadn’t planned on making changes to that now.
However, I also think it’s a good idea, so I’ll investigate in more detail now if it wouldn’t be overly hard on the Bugzilla admin side to do so (e.g. I believe I’ll have to give all existing users the rights to be able to confirm bugs). If the “UNCONFIRMED” status can be introduced relatively easily, I now plan to do so, and will adapt the proposed documentation at https://reviews.llvm.org/D53691 accordingly.
Thanks for pointing to this!

Just a status update on investigations to enable the UNCONFIRMED/CONFIRMED states: it seems that bugzilla by-default will put bugs in the “CONFIRMED” state when creating new bugs, if the reporter has “can-confirm” rights. I believe our de facto policy is for everyone with an account to be able to confirm bugs. Also, you need an account to be able to report a bug. The result is that all new bugs by default will go to status “CONFIRMED”, unless the reporter carefully remembers to change the default and select “UNCONFIRMED”. (Also see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915682 which suggests this behaviour is not configurable).

Unless that can be solved, I fear that many bugs will be reported with the default “CONFIRMED” status even though they aren’t triaged yet. I believe that is worse than the current default “NEW” state.

The only work around for this behaviour where we still get a “to be triaged” state I can think of at the moment is to introduce a custom “CONFIRMED” status, not using bugzilla’s built-in special “UNCONFIRMED” support and have a flow that would allow something like:

NEW -> CONFIRMED -> ASSIGNED -> RESOLVED -> …

The advantage is we’d have separate states to represent “this bug was raised” (NEW) vs “this bug was triaged & confirmed” (CONFIRMED).
The disadvantage is that we’ll start deviating from the default bugzilla workflows.

Overall, I think it’s still a win to implement the above idea. I’ll look into that next week and am all ears for better solutions.

Thanks,

Kristof
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