Update on bug system for OpenJDK (web-discuss)

[Ben Evans]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 5:52 PM, <mark.reinhold at oracle.com> wrote:

> 2011/5/25 3:30 -0700, aph at redhat.com:
> > On 05/25/2011 11:08 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> >> ...
> >>
> >> Every time I've had to use Bugzilla I've been amazed at how stone age
> >> it is (looking now, it has improved a little, but its still poor). Not
> >> that JIRA is perfect - the recent changes added far too much white
> >> space and blandness, making the UI harder to use (are you listening
> >> Atlassian?). Our views are not important however, what matters is
> >> usability by "real world" users that don't write open source.
> >
> > I don't believe that.  The usability of the bug database by developers
> > is critical.
>
> I completely agree.  The primary users of this bug system are OpenJDK
> Contributors.  It will be readable by anyone, of course, but I'm not
> sure it should be writable by anyone other than Contributors.
>
> Oracle's intent, by the way, is to continue funding an internal team
> to triage bug reports submitted by developers and users [1].  Once the
> open system is in place I expect many of those reports will wind up in
> that system.
>

JIRA has highly customizable workflows - so we can actually have the best of
both worlds.

We could allow open submission of bugs (although may not public commenting
on bugs).

Then the internal Oracle team could move a Submitted bug into an Open /
Triaged state or to Closed if it's obviously spurious.

That way, the bug appears instantly in the database and has a permanent URL,
which prevents the disconnect between the bug being submitted and appearing
hours or days later, without necessarily any easy way to link it to the
original bug report.

However, this also allows views to be driven only off the filtered view,
preventing contributors tripping over potentially large numbers of spurious
bugs.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Ben