Re: [gentoo-dev] [v4] Planning for automatic assignment computation of bugs

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 03:49:35PM +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Sat, 18 Oct 2008, Robin H Johnson wrote:
>
> > 3. If you want the default assignment to go to a maintainer, and NOT
> >    the herd, move the <herd> element further down in the metadata.xml!
>
> I disagree about this point. IMHO the procedure described in
> <http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/bug-wranglers/> makes more sense:
>
> # When the file [i.e., metadata.xml] lists multiple entries, then you
> # assign the bug to the first maintainer, and CC the other
> # maintainer(s) and herd(s).
See now, here I disagree. If you review the v1 proposal, there was a LOT
of resistance to your assignment procedure there, primarily from teams
where this produced a lot of spam.

The package belongs to the team if a herd element exists, and maintainer is the
person who usually fixes it the most, and is the best person to ask for
detailed package questions.

Some devs have gotten so annoyed about the duplicate spam in the past, that
they've taken the herd out of the metadata.xml, replacing it with no-herd.

It's also a LOT easier to search for bugs assigned to the team than having to
search for bugs assigned to each of the maintainer with the team in the CC,
because the team may be in the CC for other reasons, producing lots of noise.

> > 2. This email is treated as an implicit maintainer element after this
> >    point. "<maintainer><email>${HERD_EMAIL}</email></maintainer>"
> Explicit maintainer elements should have precedence over implicit ones.
How much precedence? This also causes problems when you have multiple atoms on
the summary line.

Here's a contrived example:
Summary: "x11-base/xorg-server-1.5.2 fails to compile when net-misc/openssh-5.1_p1 is installed - errant headers"
(I added both donnie and vapier just for the example).

x11-base/xorg-server:
<herd>x11</herd>
<maintainer><email>dberkholz@g.o</email></maintainer>

net-misc/openssh:
<herd>base-system</herd>
<maintainer>
  <email>robbat2@g.o</email>
  <description>LPK issues. Only assign if it's a direct LPK issue, I'm on base-system for everything else.</description>
</maintainer>
<maintainer><email>vapier@g.o</email></maintainer>

It SHOULD be assigned to x11, and CC to base-system, unless the description
also mentions it being specific to LPK (OpenSSH key storage in LDAP), in which
case I should be CC or assigned to as well.

Possible orders, with the atoms being processed in order:
1. x11, (dberkholz, base-system, vapier)
2. dberkholz, (x11, base-system, vapier)
3. x11, (dberkholz, vapier, base-system)
4. dberkholz, (x11, vapier, base-system)

I push for #1 as the most correct. If multiple assignees were possible, I'd
even say this order was better:
(x11, base-system), (dberkholz, vapier)

The GNOME guys have lots of similar cases to the openssh metadata, where one
team member is the actual maintainer listed, but the herd is present as well,
and they want 

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy
E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85