Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 80009
Bugzilla's new forced serialization is disruptive to those who use bugzilla in a parallelized fashion
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:49:09 EDT
When updating bug reports using the new bugzilla, I've found that once I submit a bug report, some new bug report comes up that is unrelated to the bug report I just submitted. I initially thought this was some weird random bug in bugzilla and discussed it with Dave, who explained it is a bugzilla feature which goes to the next bug in your list. I personally find this "feature" to be extremely inconvenient and intrusive to how I personally use bugzilla. I do not have a use for clicking on one bug report, and then going through all of them one at a time in sequence, and bugzilla forcing this upon me is extremely confusing. I recognize that everyone will have their own personal preferences, and that some people may like this new feature for one reason or another. It may be a big help to some, however it is a very big hindrance to me personally. A feature like this really should be a per-user option that one can enable or disable in preferences or somesuch, and not forced on to all users. Please realize that different types of software and different development practices have different patterns. And different developers also have different patterns how they do things. It is not useful to me at all to ever go through XFree86 bug reports one at a time automatically. The new bugzilla, without a doubt is awesome. This one "feature" though is really setting me back and losing bug reports, getting sidetracked on other issues than what I am trying to focus on, etc. Here is how I use bugzilla, and how I expect it to work in order to be the most useful to me for XFree86 maintenance. I use mozilla as my web browser and make extensive use of tabbed browsing. I open all tabs up in the background always, so that the page can load up behind the scenes, whilst I do other things in the current window, or elect to manually choose another window. I find this the most efficient, as then I am not staring blankly and idly at a browser window waiting for it to pop up and finish loading. I open up one tab on the left, and bring up a bug list on it from one of my many preset bookmark queries in my Mozilla bugzilla folder on my personal toolbar. Once that list is open, I middle click on any bug IDs that are interesting or which I need to look at. I may look at one or two, or may pop up an entire list of them each in the background and in their own tab. I go through these related reports, duping, adding cross references, etc. as needed, and trying to deal with issues that are identical, or all related to one single area of XFree86 at a time, such as "xfs", "fonts", "radeon driver", etc. This is all in parallel as I use multiple tabs. I generally leave those tabs open until I am done with them also, and sometimes I update a report with some info, then plan on performing another operation on the same bug immediately afterward, or not too long after. While looking at other bug reports, I sometimes want to update report 12345, then look at 4 others that are open, then add info to 12345 from the others, etc. and maybe update them again, etc. Bugzilla's current behaviour however when I update a report, forces me to go to the next report in the list, which may or may not even be related to the problem domain that I am investigating right now, but is just next serially in the list. For bugs that I've pre-opened that are actually chosen off a list serially, what happens is I've already got the top 5-10 bugs in the list open, I update one of them, bugzilla bumps the bug to the next one, and now I have two copies of the same bug open. I don't notice this as I don't sit and watch bugzilla update a bug, I go to another tab and begin working on the next thing. When I come back, now I have 2 bugs the same open, and end up in a big mess. It is extremely frustrating, and is severely limiting my usage of bugzilla. This new "feature" may indeed be a wonderful thing for people who use bugzilla in a 'serial' nature, perhaps with a small number of bug reports, or with packages that don't have many bug reports, but for me at least, working with bugzilla with a large number of bug reports open in parallel, it is extremely disruptive. Please make bugzilla revert to the behaviour of the old bugzilla in not auto-jumping to the next bug report, or else make it a user preference so that both developers that view many bugs in parallel and developers that go through bugs more serially can have a default setup that works well.
AOL. Says it all. I was really confused after the first couple of instances (I usually have multiple browser windows open, each on with 'his' bugzilla entry). Please make it configurable at least. Thanks, Read ya, Phil
AOL. I also use tabbed browsing and don't want my bug windows confused.
I couldn't read that whole thing, but I like the old behavior better.
Non-AOL, new behavior is way better for going through bug lists. If we start using milestones and keywords appropriately, we should have many meaningful queries that need to be gone through as a list. People just don't have good queries or bug lists right now because we've lacked features such as keywords. e.g. going through all GinGinBlocker bugs assigned to me, going through all bugs without the Triaged keyword, going through all bugs assigned to me with priority High, etc., those are all common operations. there's a big "go back to bug XYZ" button when it goes to the next bug, after all.
>Non-AOL, new behavior is way better for going through bug lists. For you maybe. Not for me. I respect your preference, please also respect mine. >If we start using milestones and keywords appropriately, we should have many >meaningful queries that need to be gone through as a list. People just don't >have good queries or bug lists right now because we've lacked features such as >keywords. I very much do that already. A given "milestone" is not something that is useful information for me to query on, however bugzilla does and has had the ability to do so for ages. It just is not useful to me in that way. What is useful, is the milestone blocker/target info that gets put on bug reports as our developmental process goes on. Dr. Mike has a status page CGI script which has been very instrumentally useful to me during the last few phases of our development each release. The habits and features that work well for one developer, with certain projects, do not necessarily work well for all developers of all projects. Forcing everyone to do things one single way because it works for one set of people, is not the way to do things. Being flexible, and allowing each person to continue to benefit from bugzilla by not having to drastically change the way they use it and throw out existing methods that work and work well. I have explained the way that I do things above. That is what works for me, and it is what I am willing to do. I have many bookmarks and preformed queries. They're not stored in bugzilla itself as that is not something I personally find useful. They are stored as bookmarks in my web browser. The premade bookmarks that I have, do what I want, and in a way that I want it to work. I work best with bugzilla by viewing bug reports in parallel. Doing so in series the way that it is set up right now, is not useful to me. If bugzilla becomes unuseable for me, then I just simply wont use it anymore. Right now, all day long I am fighting with this stupid serialization and it is driving me absolutely nuts. In the short term, bugzilla should go back to the way it was before in this regard, and in the long term, if this new "feature" is considered useful by some developers, then it should be made an option as stated above. That way you get to work serially in a way that makes you work most effectively, and myself, mkj, bfox, pknirsh, and others get to work in a manner that works best for us. For me, that is viewing bugs in parallel, and not one after the other in the same tab.
4 AOL's to 1 Non-AOL. The AOL's win!!! 5 votes makes a democracy. Changing back to old way until preferences can be made.
Opened a new RFE bug 80270 and added interested parties to cc list.