[gentoo-dev] Planning for automatic assignment of bugs

[Robin H. Johnson]

So as a not-so-brief follow-up to solar's email, here is a brief
proposal on the automatic assignment stuff, incl. one spot that we might
need to add an attribute to metadata.xml.

Assignment process, triggering:
===============================
Auto-assignment will be be applied/available in the following cases:
1. New bugs created with the guided process, having a Product equal to
   'Gentoo Linux' and a component not equal to 'Eclasses and Profiles'.
2. Open bugs will have a new action available: 'Reassign by metadata',
   with a text input field. The text field will be auto-filled with a
   package atom $CAT/$PN by parsing the summary line. Using the action
   will provide the package atom to the next stage.

If multiple package atoms are present in a summary line, the first one
wins.

Assignment process, after the package is known:
===============================================

We have a package spec now, so we can find who to assign the bug to.

Objectives in this section are to reduce unwanted duplicate mail, while
still preserving the data in metadata for non-automated usage.

Case 1 - Metadata contains only a herd
--------------------------------------
- The herd will have @gentoo.org appended, and this must be a valid
  bugzilla account.

Case 2 - Metadata contains a single maintainer
----------------------------------------------
- The herd field is not used.
- The maintainer address is used as the bugzilla assignee. 
This is important for all the herds that have aliases that are NOT the
same as their herd name!
This diverges from existing manual practice, to avoid unnecessary
duplicate mail, and means that existing metadata may need a cleanup.

Case 3 - Metadata contains multiple maintainers
-----------------------------------------------
- Follow case 2 first.
- Further maintainer addresses are used in the CC field.

Case 4 - Metadata contains multiple maintainers, some special
-------------------------------------------------------------
- Follow case 3 first.
- If a maintainer is listed in the metadata for special reasons (eg only
  for some special patch), they should include the 'contact=0' attribute
  on their maintainer element AND have a role element present
  describing why.
- This also allows for cases where the herd address should be used as
  the assignee, and the maintainer does NOT want a duplicate CC.

Comments etc welcome.

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