On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Antonio Gomes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi. > > Why bugs keep being added and removed from the meta bugs "blocking/depends > on" list? It makes bugzilla too spammy, and does not make any sense to me: > If it is FIXED, it will be marked (even visually) as such on the meta > blocker list, so why doubling the number of bugemails we get by removing it > from the meta bug blocking list? > > For all other projects I've working on (including Mozilla and QtWebKit in > the past) the meta bugs were common, but such a practice was not happening. > but now it is. > > Maybe there is a good reason of course, but if it is noising more for > everybody than helping a small group, it should be reconsidered? >
Hi Antonio. That's a recurrent question and an interesting discussion. I myself asked this same very question on the first day Simon explained the system to me. On these days, when I'm very active cherry-picking stuff, these e-mails start to bother everybody and someone always complains. :-) I'm sure there are some ways to improve the system and I'll propose a couple of them at the end, but in summary: Please note that the question: "which bugs are currently blocking the release?" is the most important question in terms of release-management (not just to me, but to all developers involved, managers, Q&A, etc). On traditional open source projects, that would be made by querying for OPEN bugs blocking the release meta-bug. But on webkit we don't track bugs on QtWebKit versions, we track bugs on trunk. That is: whenever a bug is FIXED, it's FIXED on trunk. There's no proper way to say: "this bug has been fixed on qtwebkit-2.2" and/or "this has been fixed on qtwebkit-2.1". So we need a hack. The current hack is: "if the bug blocks the 2.2 meta-bug, it has not been fixed there yet". Ditto for 2.1, 2.0 and for "bugs fixed in some release but pending trunk inclusion" (bug #32653). Corollary: there's no clean way to open a bug that affects only a particular release of QtWebKit (but that's a different problem that usually doesn't give us much trouble). So let's look at some alternatives or ways to mitigate the problem: (please note that the process is fully automated these days using qtwebkit-tools / webkitpy, so there will be a cost in implementing any of these changes) 1. I think one of the problems is that the current script does two actions on each blocking bug: a) add the comment about the cherry-pick and b) remove the bug from the blockers list. That triggers two e-mails. The script could be smarter and do both actions together (not currently supported by webkitpy, AFAIK). 2. We could leave the bugs always blocking the meta-bug but add keywords to individual bugs such as "IncludedInQtWebKit-22" and "IncludedInQtWebKit-21" so that we could make a bugzilla query to see what's pending inclusion (as a bonus, we would get a report of what's included in each release via bugzilla). I think that's too intrusive on the keyword system and other vendors may not like it... We'll have to keep creating keywords for every of our releases. And you'll still receive e-mails anyway when these keywords are added (probably less e-mails). 3. [hack idea from Caio] Instead of keywords, we could have fake emails added to the CC of cherry-picked bugs, such as [email protected]. Same logic of keywords: a bugzilla query would let us know which bugs block the release but don't have the e-mail on the CC. Also triggers e-mails and is very hackish. :-) 4. We could come up with some filtering rules to discard e-mails that just remove the bugs from the blocking list... 5. We could control the bugs blocking the release outside of bugzilla (JIRA? I don't like this, controling the release outside of bugzilla is a kind of dangerous route to follow). Please note that the question: "which bugs have been fixed on this particular release?" is currently answered via git-log (see my weekly announcements). I don't plan to change that because sometimes I cherry-pick stuff directly without involving the master bug (I watch the trunk and cherry-pick regressions and crash fixes from other vendors -- in these cases I just run my script that adds a comment on the bug, thus minimally spamming the developers). As the author of the changes, I don't receive any of these e-mails (lucky me), so I don't know exactly which ones bother you most... How do you think we could improve the system, given the "requirements" and restrictions above? Thanks, - Ademar -- Ademar de Souza Reis Jr. <[email protected]> OpenBossa - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia _______________________________________________ webkit-qt mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-qt
