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

[Jani Nikula]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2022, Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> E-mail *clients* are horrible to keep track of state. E-mail itself,
> as in RFC822 (and newer), SMTP and other protocols, only handle
> transport of data. As the data within the e-mail body is free-formed,
> and wasn't meant to track items and their state, clients never evolved
> in that direction.

Email is a massively distributed software fuzzing project that lets you
transmit messages in the sideband. :p

> Bugzilla won't solve this. The huge elephant in the room is that most
> maintainers are overworked. Whether a bug report arrives in my mailbox
> as an e-mail straight from the reporter or from a bug tracker will
> make very little difference if I don't have time to look into it (I
> would even argue that bug trackers are even worse there: if I'm really
> short of time, I'm more likely to prioritize replying to e-mails
> instead of having to open a link in a web browser).

I think a bug tracker helps in quantifying the problems you have,
though, including the maintainer bandwidth. Email doesn't easily lend
itself to that kind of analysis. I can't point managers at list emails
and ask for help. And if you do get people to help, having a centralized
place for the bug data helps them.

The flip side is that it's easier for me to ignore notification mails
from a bug tracker because I know the info isn't lost in a sea of other
mails.


BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Graphics Center