Over the last few weeks I have worked more intensively with bugs.kde.org (bko) – our Bugzilla installation. While doing so I realized that Bugzilla is much more powerful than most of us know and that many of the complaints about bugs.kde.org are caused by us developers using bko in a wrong/inefficient way. Also it seems like there is no proper documentation on how to use bko as a developer. We find lots of information on how to use it as a user or as a triager, but not for developers. No new developer gets mentored on how to use bko, although it would be so important to have also our GSoC students taking part in using bko right from the start.
I want for all developers to turn bko from the monster you don’t want to use into the most important tool for developing your software. With KWin I’m close to that state where I start to benefit from bko and don’t see it as my “enemy” any more.
So I want to share the knowledge I gained for using bko in a blog series. All the posts I will write in the scope of this blog series will be merged into a wiki page. If there is a specific topic you want to have covered in the blog series, please leave a comment to this blog post.
More people should use BLOCKS/DEPENDS and the dependency graphing feature to make meta-bugs to track progress on larger development themes. Cover that :).
I quite agree, never understood why we don’t use it, started to use it some weeks ago and decided to have one blog post about it.
Versions!
i.e., properly take care of updating the version number of the own applications/libraries (which is a good thing to do in any case), making sure all the versions are listed in the bugzilla products, and properly use the Version field to mark the _first_ version a bug was found (not the latest).