[MeeGo-touch-dev] internal vs. public bug tracker (was: libmeegotouch 0.20.44-1 has been tagged.)

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Michael Hasselmann wrote:
>>     There's nothing preventing you from filing what ever bugs you think
>>     need to be reported for the publicly available code and setting
>>     dependencies on them.
> 
> Do you believe that this is sustainable?

It seems to have worked in bugs.maemo.org.  Community maintains
the information in community bug tracker (community naturally
involves also Nokia employees, not necessarily from Nokia email
addresses if they have their "hobby" hat on).  "Bug master" makes
sure that relevant things are synched to internal tracker and
information from there gets to public one.

When a public bug is synced to internal bug tracker, internal bug
number is added to the external bug and link added to internal bug
pointing to the public bug.  This internal bug number in the public
bug can be used to map NB#<bug ID> items in changelogs to public
bugs in an automated way.


This could probably be helped quite a bit if there can be some
automated stuff that the "bug master" could use (extra buttons for:
creating searches for internal bug tracker, copying bugs there, buttons
in both trackers for copying comments to the other tracker etc) and
which isn't visible for normal users as they don't have access &
track to both bug trackers.

If a public bug is a new one and the issue doesn't exist in internal
tracker, I would expect internal developer to subscribe to public
bug. If the bug is found only in public, it doesn't make sense
for somebody else spend his time in forwarding comments between
the trackers.

Each vendor having its own additional bug tracker would probably
need such a "bug master", at least if they maintain open components
in MeeGo.


	- Eero

PS. Some of the reasons why bugs.maemo.org has so much fewer bugs
than the internal one are:
- External bug tracker for most components gets into picture only
   when the device goes out i.e. the SW is already stable
- External Maemo bugzilla tracks only Nokia's released software,
   not test builds (as those aren't available outside) etc.
- There are relatively few bugs reported for Non-Nokia/community
   packages listed in in bugs.maemo.org.  This is mostly because
   they get much less testing I guess.

MeeGo has more visibility to the code than Maemo, and it will
have its own test-builds that are to some extent independent of
the products built on top of it so this bug amount ratio might
not be true anymore once there are few MeeGo handset products
out.  Let's see.