114760 - Bugs not planning to be worked on need to be clarified for other developers

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

There are a thousand unfixed bugs in Bugzilla that no one is planning to fix
that don't have any information on:
A) What we want if this is implemented
B) A skeleton of what needs to be done to implement

Knowlegable people that don't have time to implement a bug (especially bug
owners) could at least provide some kind of data on what needs to be done to
implement it ON THE BUGZILLA SYSTEM in a place where someone who has time and is
looking for something to do but might not know where to start can get started.
That is within the bug. I think we should add to all the bugs that don't have
enough information so someone can weight whether or not they can implement it
and not enough information to get started so that people who have the time but
maybe not the expertise of some seasoned developers can get started on bugfixing.

Comment 1

[Itamar]

This sounds like a discusstion.
it should go on the newsgroup or the forums at:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/index.php?f=0

Comment 2

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

I agree that there should be a discussion of this, but this bug is for keeping
track of progress towards having enough info on how to implement bugs. 

I don't know how we would go about doing this, but whatever we decide in
discussions should be summarized in this bug. 

I also thought this bug could keep track of bugs that need to be worked on, but
that would be way to much to put in this bug. Therefore, I think this bug should
be used to track progress only.

Comment 3

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=2&i=129&t=129

I posted a discussion on Mozillazine. 

See bug 23560 for an example of what I'm talking about. No one is planning on
implementing this bug, yet there is was no information on what they wanted to
see. Putting in versioning information is not something that is open to be done
any old way. Mozilla.org probably has a very specific idea of what should be done.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Assigning to Brian.  Confirming to get this off the unco radar

Comment 5

[[not reading bugmail]]

for example I'd like to re-iterate something I've already noticed, like about
400+ bookmark bugs, pchen is not even working on but assigned to about 250+ (non
enhancements) of these and no qa person is even writing any questions/comments
about them.. so some people like myself have been trying to Qa & verify, mark
wfm, or otherwise when I can, to helpout bug triage.  Since the bookmark
outliner landing I've been trying to get rid of some, but I too do not have
enough time to get thru and sift the ones I can at least understand something
about or I have the ability to try to reproduce any problems.  The rest, I vote
for mass mailing reporters about whether the problem is still there, and some
people probably are not even checking those email addresses anymore.. let alone
responding, (that get email notifications).

I like this idea, when we find some people are not doing any work on the project
for awhile.  Light a fire under people's behinds. :)

Comment 6

[Daniel Wang]

-> mozilla.org

Comment 7

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

-- Example --

Start quote from Kurtis McCathern (
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52746#c89):
---------

Hey, due to personal events in my life, I'm gonna be unable to work on this bug
for the forseeable future <snip>

When I dropped by the Mozilla dev channel, the guys weren't as helpful as they
could've been.  In fact, the guy who gave me the most information made it sound
like the change should be fairly easy for him, but he just didn't have time to
do it and when I was asking him questions kept responding just with "no, do it
this way" instead of explaining to me what was going on.

That said, it doesn't look impossible, but it does seem to involve interaction
between a couple of different parts of the Mozilla source, so a developer
knowledgeable about the Mozilla architecture is probably a better fit for this
than me.  If this is still open next year, I may look at it again.

---------
End quote



By the way, you usually get more information on the Mozillazine Forums or the
message board. Still, when they give information to people in those mechanisms,
it'd be nice if they added it to the bug report, which is MEANT for development
information.

I often see them talking in the IRC channel, but yet they don't say anything in
the bug. There are channel logs now, etc, but they still should be giving a
synopsis in the bug report itself. That's what it's made for.

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I don't see how this bug can be taken forward in any useful way. If you need info from someone on how to fix a bug, you need to ask them for it.

Gerv