Use of assignments in Bugzilla

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

In the course of triaging and fixing open glibc bugs - something that 
could certainly do with more people working on it - it's become clear that 
the vast bulk of bugs in glibc Bugzilla are "assigned" to someone who is 
neither working on them nor has any intention of working on them any time 
soon.

I've generally removed those misleading assignments when reviewing a bug - 
that is, reassigned to unassigned@sourceware.org (much the same as GCC 
bugs default to being assigned to unassigned@gcc.gnu.org, since Bugzilla 
seems to want *something* in the assigned-to field).  I propose that we 
adopt an understanding of the assigned-to information as follows:

* A bug being assigned to someone indicates that have an intention to work 
on a fix in the reasonably near future.

* If a bug is also ASSIGNED (rather than NEW), that indicates the person 
is actively working on a fix.

* If you simply think someone will be interested in a bug, CC rather than 
assigning them unless they have specifically asked to be assigned.

* Components should no longer have bugs default-assigned to particular 
individuals (that is, unassigned@sourceware.org should be the default 
assignment); rather, people should choose when to assign bugs to 
themselves when they have some specific intention with regard to a 
specific bug.  (Note I don't have the Bugzilla powers to make such a 
configuration change.)

* The default-assignments should be removed from existing open bugs.  
Rather than just removing them all blindly, it's better actually to look 
at a bug enough to decide you think it is a real issue still present in 
the current code, but that you're not going to fix it right now, and to 
decide if it's in the correct component, if possible, and to remove the 
assignment at the same time as making any comment you wish to make on the 
bug.  (That is, removing default assignments is better done as part of 
triage than separately touching each bug for both purposes.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com