Hm about a new flag in bugzilla, right now, we have:

needs-spec
needs-design
needs-patch
(needs-testing?)
needs-review

If I understand right, the new flag you're proposing would fit after
the needs-patch step, but before the needs-review step (needs-review
I'm taking to be Mark officially reviewing the patch for committing
into the codebase. I think that could work, but I worry that without
any way to notify interested parties explicitly, the patch could just
sit there and be ignored.

I've seen a lot of people in various threads volunteer to do testing
(and I suspect there are others currently lurking who haven't said
anything yet, but would be willing to try), and from discussions in
IRC, I think many of the active developers would be happy to have
another set of eyes make sure they don't break anything once their
patch is ready. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to hook up the
two groups!

Currently, volunteers interested in testing a bug can choose to watch
a particular bug they're interested in, and then step forward to offer
to look once a patch is uploaded to bugzilla and submitted for review.
However, I don't think this is scalable. The tester needs to remember
to watch each bug they're interested in; either that, or they'd need
to choose to be notified of all activity, on all bugs, in bugzilla.

Doing a shout-out on IRC, or over here in DW-discuss could be better
for pinging potential testers, but possible problems: I think that not
everyone interested hangs out in IRC, and that it could potentially
get spammy if posted on dw-discuss. It's less spammy if only  the
original shout-out is posted to the list, and all other discussion is
done either through one-to-one correspondence, or on the bugzilla
report itself, but I'm still worried that the additional volume could
force other subscribers to start tuning out all mail from dw-discuss.

What do you think? Are there other/better avenues of communication?

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 4:42 PM, PauAmma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As Mark commented on http://www.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86,
> need-testing is for patches that need testing (on a staging server) once
> they're committed, not for patches that could use early exposure to testers.
> Should there be a flag for those? Or is a request on the list or in the IRC
> channel enough?
>
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