We already had discussion on wine-devel about importance of polishing Wine, making a set of applications to work very well.
Cruicial in this process is prioritizing of the issues, work distribution between developers. The companies already have internal testing and bug fixing process.
Of course, each company has their own product-specific work, but most of the problems are general for Wine. I suggest to share this work more actively using Bugzilla.
Recently there was some work done in cleaning the issues database and it is in pretty much usable condition.
To start using bugzilla more actively I suggest following steps: 1) define subsystem/direction owners. The owners will get their system-specific bugs. They won't necessary fix the bugs themselfs, but will have complete picture about all the issues in their subsystems and coordinate the bug fixing.
Developers, please let me know your areas of expertese. I can overview Wine applications.
2) more formally define process of bugs handling and use this process. There is no high qualification needed to filter out bad bug reports, duplicates, request users for more information, attach relay trace to the bug, etc, etc. Result - developers will have to spend less time on discussion trivial bugs with users, will have better bug reports to work on, users will be more involved with more active feedback. Some users are very cooperative and some bug reports are really excellent! I see that Tony Lambregts, Michael Cardenas, others do a great work with the Bugzilla database. I'm also going to contribute some time for this.
3) Prioritize bugs. This is, probably, part of (2). Some bugs, while relatively easy to fix provide very big value for the end user. Often developers do not choose such issues to work on, exactly because these issues do not present challenge to them. BTW, I do not see a field "Priority" in the bugs entries.
4) Ask users to submit there problems in Bugzilla. Submitting Bugzilla report allows us to involve users more actively, persist their bug reports.
Bugzilla is a more scalable approach than using mailing list only. Of course we still will discuss bugs on the mailing lists, bug big part of communication will be unloaded.
There is a lot to do and discuss. For me the goal is to have this process not worse than in Mozilla project. This is impressive: http://webtools.mozilla.org/miscstats/ http://mothra.mozilla.org/webtools/miscstats/
I also like their bug report form: http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html
And this is for 1 application only! I'm sure Wine can generate much bigger volume of bug reports ;-)
Look forward for your comments. Andriy
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