Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Squashing bugs!

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 11:10 AM Konstantin Ryabitsev
<konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> May I recommend using a project like git-bug [1] instead of a mailing
> list?

I'm not a huge fan of mailing lists only for bug handling, but on the
other hand, I do think that a bug handling thing fundamentally needs

 (a) automatic aging out of bug reports

 (b) targeted push notifications (ie ractically speaking - email)

and that the email part is important. And it can't just be a "hey,
something changed". It needs to contain enough information in the
email to give a developer sufficient knowledge that the developer
knows whether it's even worth it looking deeper at the bug, and
looking at the database (in fact, it should contain enough actual
information that for simple issues, the developer should go "D'oh!"
and just fix the bug).

We went through this with syzbot already, where the notification was
too heavy-handed and not useful. It has improved immensely. There's a
back-end with lots more data, but the emails have gone from "illegible
data" to "pretty informational", and I think it improved peoples
reaction to them a lot.

Apparently syzbot doesn't do well on the (a) side though. Honestly,
any system that just keeps things open for 300+ days has something
wrong with it. At some point it needs to be automatically either
closed, or re-notified. The "just keep it around" is simply not an
option.

                  Linus