Living in the avalanche … or unexpected results of one bit

Po 08 listopadu 2010

While fighting with my bugs couple of months ago (around a F14 Beta, IIRC), I got annoyed by number of bugs waiting on being eliminated in EOS with unreplied needinfos. When going through them I discovered to my unhappy surprise that many of these automatically created bugs don’t have needinfo flag set, which made my life even worse. My defined queries filter out bugs with needinfo flag set, because they are not my concern.

image of the avalanche

Courtesy of DCSL on Flickr

So, I’ve hoped to #fedora-bugzappers to find out what was it that those EOS warnings were not setting needinfo flag. I’ve found that basically just nobody thought about that or something and I was promised that this will be fixed for F12 EOS messages. I returned to my bugs and completely forgot about whole thing.

With the release of F14, the standard EOS message was sent to thousands of bugs at once. Then a strange thing happened: instead of few dozen replies I was used to getting, an avalanche of messages started to flow in. I had to see over hundred messages yesterday and people were confirming bugs being fixed, or not, adding more interesting data and I was completely swallowed by the avalanche of this small tidbits. I was able to unearth some completely forgotten bugs, close tons of duplicates, and revive some bugs which were looking like heading towards sad fate of being EOSed.

Interesting how much one bit matters.

Category: computer Tagged: bugTriage Fedora