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call for assistance: glibc bugzilla triage


Quite some time ago, GOTO Masanori volunteered to do bug triage for glibc.
We are very grateful to him for those efforts.  The work is always tedious
and often thankless, and can easily be very time-consuming especially for a
single person to cope with.  This lone volunteer has not been able to spend
all the time it would take to consistently handle the load.  Recently
Ulrich Drepper asked me to change the default bugzilla owner to himself,
because the efforts volunteered to date have not kept up with the need.
Ulrich and some other libc developers do some occasional spurts of plowing
through reports.  But their time is really better spent fixing the problems
that have been verified, not sifting through reports to find them.

I am asking for a new, sustained, coordinated contribution of efforts to
make glibc bug tracking much better.  If you care about glibc or about its
users, if you rely on glibc's code for your business, please contribute to
managing its maintenance.  This is what we need.  Individual volunteers are
great, but understandably they can rarely stick it out doing the
unenjoyable, dull work that must be done continually.  For every person who
volunteers and helps, I am grateful for every spare hour they do put in--my
heartfelt personal thanks especially to anyone who helps with the unfun
admin stuff and aggravating bug triage.  In particular since I find it so
onerous myself, I could never ask these individuals to do even more of it.
(If you can hack some code or write some documentation and that's more fun
a way to contribute to the project, then for goodness sake, do that!)
Organizations that use glibc, that package glibc, that work on glibc and
want to contribute to its development, should expect to put some resources
back into the project, even into the project "overhead"--not just fixing
bugs that matter to you.  This means allocating paid time of people to help
the project on the tedious work of bug triage and release management that
has to be done for the good of us all.  Pitch in, and I'll sing your praises!

I hope to see a team of people (supported to do it if they are not saints)
take responsibility for handling glibc bugzilla reports as they come in, to
filter them into reasonable verified problem reports for developers to work
on, to track that the problems get fixed, that the fixes get verified
against the reporter's test cases, that the fixes get merged onto release
branches and verified there, and that reports don't fall through the
cracks.  I don't expect a repeat attempt for a single volunteer to do it
all to be viable, saints notwithstanding.  The work should be done steadily
on a daily and weekly basis, and no one person can be expected to have it
all pile up on their head.  I would love to see some organizations state in
no uncertain terms their commitment to contribute labor resources to the
bug management effort, specifically to form a team to be responsible for
bug tracking.  I'm talking fancy, but the "resources" required are really
just a few hours a week from several people.  What's needed is the
commitment to allocate that time consistently and stick it out with a
sustained cooperative process that keeps going.

I am eager to facilitate such new efforts however I can.  They require
other people to step up and take charge of making it happen--that's what
this plea is about.  (I am already the release manager, among other things.)
I just speak my mind without consulting anyone, and can be contradicted any
time, but I'll assert that here I'm speaking on behalf of the core glibc
developers and the glibc steering committee.  Thanks for your attention to
my rants, and for your contributions, past, present, and future, to glibc.


Thanks,
Roland


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