[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** Bug reporting (was: Evergreen Release Candidate 1.6.0.0RC1 is available)

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 15:08 -0400, Grace Dunbar wrote:
> The Evergreen development team is pleased to announce the immediate
> availability of  Evergreen 1.6.0.0RC1.

I'm very glad to hear it's out, although as one of the members of the
development team, I'm also a little surprised by the announcement. There
hasn't been any discussion about releasing 1.6 on the dev list for quite
some time. Was there a recent discussion on IRC that I missed in the
logs?

> 1.6.0.0RC1 is a release candidate and, while we encourage our clients
> and community with test servers download this version to test, we do
> not endorse putting 1.6.0.0RC1 directly into production.  The bug
> reporting window for 1.6.0.0RC1 will open on September 14, 2009 and
> close on October 2, 2009.

Okay, so we are trying out a form of time-based releases then? Cool.

> For general community members reporting bugs, please send them to the
> development mailing list at Open-ils-dev at list.georgialibraries.org and
> please include “bug” and “1.6.0.0RC1” somewhere in the subject.  If
> you have a support contract with an Evergreen vendor, please submit
> any bug reports through your normal support channels.

I disagree with this suggestion. As the number of support vendors grows,
I think it becomes more important to have bug reporting centrally and
openly visible, rather than dividing the bug reports up between vendor
support channels. Otherwise, there will be a duplication of effort on
the part of testers and bug fixers - and some important but obscure bugs
might be hidden that could otherwise be fixed by the community.
Reporting the problem to a vendor support channel as well is fine, but I
believe the priority channel for bug reporting should be the dev mailing
list (in lieu of any more formal openly accessible bug reporting
systems).

The one exception might be security bugs, but those should probably go
to a closed security list rather than only to vendor support channels.