[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Bug reporting (was: Evergreen ReleaseCandidate 1.6.0.0RC1 is available)

[Wills,Steve]

I am playing catch-up on the bug reporting topic in general but have
volunteered, via the Documentation Interest Group, to look into how we
report and track our bugs.  My understanding is that the Bugzilla
facility has not been used in a while?

I agree that reporting bugs only on the mailing lists is a recipe for
letting errors slip through the cracks.  I am wondering how I can best
help facilitate bug tracking for the community.

Steve Wills
Open Source Consultant
NELINET (soon to be Lyrasis)

-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Dan
Scott
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 3:54 PM
To: Evergreen Development Discussion List
Cc: Evergreen General Discussion List
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** Bug reporting (was: Evergreen
ReleaseCandidate 1.6.0.0RC1 is available)

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.