The Sabayon bugzilla recently reached the 1000 bug milestone, note this reported bugs, currently we are running at 75 open bugs which includes bugs for every one of the thousands of entropy packages and new entropy package requests, which isn’t too bad, in my opinion at least.

We have to remember that there are 3 core developers, 2 entropy maintainers and about 1o or so core staff, which is the entire Sabayon team and such our resources are not usually freely available.

Anyway, when browsing the bugzilla there are a few trends I would like to comment on, firstly and the bane of Azerthoth’s existence it seems, is that every single bug needs some basic information on a selection of things that are relevant to the bug.

• Hardware Issue – Dmesg, lspci or lsusb as appropriate, kernel version, entropy version.
• Entropy Package Issue – Exact version number of the package, Full install log, Any error messages produced by the application when run from a command line, entropy version, branch number and Arch.
• Live Disk Issues – Did you check the MD5, Did you burn slow?
• Overlay/Ebuild Issue – emerge –info output, full build log, portage version.

Just adding these simple bits of information makes the developers lives easier and allows the issue to get fixed quicker, so its best for everyone.

Secondly then is the issue of bug naming. For example the below is very bad and well, annoying:

mail crashed

What does this tell the developers scanning through a buglist or seeing a notification email? Nothing at all about the actual issue, on the other hand a name like:

mail-client/evolution-2.8.3-r2: crash if I close the mail window while checking for new POP mail

Will definitely speed up the process and mean that it canbe put into the hands of the right people to deal with it straight away. Yay!

Finally then, is the issue of user persistence. Our bugzilla has a number of open bugs that are waiting on users to come back to the developers with feedback from possible fixes, version bumps, backports, recompiles etc. The users who went to the time and effort to report the bug now seem to have disappeared completely and the bug is just left hanging  open for a while until it gets closed as invalid due to lack of user input and the issue is therefore never really resolved 100%.

It is important that users stay with their issues and check it occasionally, by default bugzilla should mail you on activity on your bug so please keep an eye out for any updates.

So, that was enough moaning for me for today, but please try to remember the above information, its quite simple and helps to make the process nice and simple.