I'm a little puzzled here: this whole discussion is because new owners want
to have the bug actually assigned to them, instead of just commenting, "I'm
working on this" in the bug?
Let's look at the github model -- there's no assignment at all. I just
file a bug, maybe make some comments on it to say I'm working on it, and
some time later I submit a pull request referencing the bug and saying, "I
fixed it". That seems to work fine for collaboration, and offers no
roadblocks.
Maybe we should be turning off bugzilla features instead of trying to 'fix'
them. The whole 'file a bug in bugzilla' process is already far too
complicated with a dozen fields which are either irrelevant or just
confusing to newcomers. Can we just hide all this cruft (including the
'assigned to' field) for most users?
--scott
On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 07/11/13 16:28, Quim Gil wrote:
The issue is the extra step for newcomers vs the
risk of many extra
steps for a few etablished contributors if someone decides to abuse the
feature, as it happened in the past. And my point is that I personally
don't believe that such barrier is diminishing the volume of actual
contributions we receive.
In order to get somewhere with this discussion, it would be useful to
know the current practice of other free software projects, using
Bugzilla or not. As a newcomer, can I assign bugs to myself in GNOME,
KDE, Ubuntu, Debian... etc?
Would that be useful, though? Generally what other free software projects
do is what works for them, and it won't necessarily work for us. It is also
most especially not necessarily good practice when it comes to actually
attracting and keeping new folks, simply due to the nature of what free
software often entails - somewhere along the line, there is usually a lack
of resources, and it is newcomers who suffer the most.
As much as projects would like, and for that matter, need, new folks, they
only have so much time to devote to it and especially when volunteers make
up a bulk of the community people wind up spending most time on other
things. Bugzilla lacks certain key features that would make it feasible to
open up from the start, and my guess would be it has something to do with
similar - it was simply not a priority, so it never happened.
For a rather extreme example, there was another project, some OS thing,
that a friend of mine wanted to contribute to awhile back, but he found
that they had disabled account creation entirely due to lack of resources
to combat spam, requiring instead that you find them on IRC or some such
and contact them that way for an account. In no way is this good practice,
and has very much harmed them as well, and yet it was probably the best
thing they could do with what they had.
Just please be careful when looking at what other people do, here. Why
they did something can be far more important than what they actually did.
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