Re: Linux 2.6.21

From: David Lang
Date: Sun Apr 29 2007 - 18:07:09 EST


On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Dave Jones wrote:

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 02:05:42AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 04:40:31PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >...
> > What's the difference between bugzilla and lkml.org? Both have search
> > buttons. Both archive the old stuff. Both can be pointed to.
>
> Mailing lists don't track bugs.

There's no reason they can't. Store them in folders 'fixed' 'pending'
'notabug' etc. Move mails between them when states change.
reply-to them when necessary. Bounce them. Add people to Ccs. etc. etc.

and archive off the old reports into folders as well. While I don't think that closeing a report becouse it hasn't seen an update in a week is reasonable, closeing a report that hasn't seen an update or retest in a couple 2.6.x releases definantly is (this is a 4-6 month period at the rate of change in the kernel the odds are pretty good that the code is no longer the same at that point)

The only remaining piece of the puzzle is "how does everyone see the
states of the various pools", which could be solved in a number of
ways, daily uploads to a place on kernel org for eg.

if people are interested in doing this it's not a technicly hard problem.

get bugs to a 'bug maintainer' e-mail address. this can either be a copy of the full lkml firehose, or volunteers who pull selected messages from the list, with a server that discards duplicates it's safe to have multiple people bounce the same message to the bug list, if they forward the message (to add a comment on who they think may need to work on it) then it will take manual weeding out of duplicates

have an IMAP server available for this address. make it read-only to the world and read-write to a list of volunteers who will sort the messages.

sort the messages into the different catagories, with a subfolder for each bug (note: the structure at this point is arbtrary, the volunteers can further orginise the folders)

with a good IMAP server you can add the address of the particular bug folder to the cc list if you want (bugs+drivers.ethernet.3com.123@xxxxxxxxxx for a complex example) to have the follow-ups go directly into that folder.

now the problem with this is that developers would still have to look at it for an overview (the volunteers would still need to copy the developers when they create a new bug)

the cyrus mail server will scale well for this sort of thing, and I beleive that it can also export the mailboxes as news feeds as well (I haven't ever configured this so I can't say the exact details)

for searching, just make it available to google (I'm sure google would cooperate with this sort of thing to find the best way to do it)

the key is to find people to volunteer to do the sorting. the hosting of this is pretty simple (for that matter, I'll offer to host it if nobody else steps up)

David Lang

Hell, you could store them in a git tree if it came to it.
That would also solve the problem for those with an aversion
to web browsers to see bugs :-)

git is not particulary good for searching the contents of things.

on that note, I wonder if google has a git:// search as part of theit git code project? if not they should.

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