Re: Planned changes for bugzilla.kernel.org to reduce the "Bugzilla blues"

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

On 10/1/22 13:07, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 01, 2022 at 01:34:26PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > Is that perfect and will in work in 100% of the cases? No, definitely
> > not. Would it be good to have a a kind of first level support group that
> > can help in this case? Sure. But we don't have one right now. I sooner
> > or later hope to work towards forming such a group, but there are other
> > things that are higher on my todo list for now.
>
> I think the other thing which we really need to say is that if you
> really want better support, there are plenty of places who will
> happily accept your money and provide you that support.
>
> Artem, it seems to me that you are hoping that volunteers will provide
> a commercial level of support --- and that's just never going to
> happen.
>
> The users vastly outnumber us developers by orders of magnitude, and
> if someone needs a huge amount of hand-holding, maybe they should be
> paying for a support contract with Red Hat, or Suse or Canonical, or
> CIQ.
>
> Can we do better?  Sure!  But I think we need to clearly set
> expectations for what upstream developers will and will not provide
> support for.  (Example: bug reports for LTS kernels are not
> interesting to me, unless you can also reproduce them in the latest
> upstream kernel --- and if you can't build your own kernel from
> scratch --- boo, hoo, maybe you need to pay someone to help you out.)
>
> I also think that we need to clearly express that any kind of support
> is best efforts only, and if someone has anything business-, mission-,
> or life-critical, they should darned well pay $$$ for a proper support
> contract.

My expectations are actually quite low:

* A central place to collect bugs (yeah, bugzilla)
* Proper up to date components (they don't change too often, so there's
not a lot of work to be done - you can refresh them probably every 12-24
months and it's gonna be totally OK)
* An ability to CC the relevant people/mailing lists (this is the only
serious missing feature)

That's it. It's a billion times better than random emails sent to random
mailing lists. Signing up once is easier that to keep track of whom and
where you've emailed or not. And of course it's a ton lot easier to find
the existing bug reports.

Bugzilla as it is works nearly perfectly. We have a number of developers
who don't want to touch it or get emails from it - it's their right.
However it would be madness to take it from users. That will make filing
and following up on bug reports an absolutely poor experience for
absolute most users.

Here's a recent fresh example:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204807

255 comments along with patches, ideas, contributions, etc. etc. over
the span of _two years_. Email will not work for such collabs, period.
No email client can even show you more than a dozen emails in such a way
you can easily follow the topic. Email is good maybe for slow-paced
interchanges of a small circle of people working on a particular
well-known issue. Even the issue we've been discussing here has become
nearly impossible to reach consensus on or remember who said who.

Best regards,
Artem