Tracking GNOME versions in bugzilla

Bugzilla needs a good way of tracking the GNOME version of a bug. Note that this may not be the same as the software version, so we cannot use the bugzilla "Version" field.

This is a star-trek document totally removed from current reality. Also, if you can think of other ways to improve GNOME versions, tell everyone.

Requirements

  1. It should be capable of tracking the existence of a bug in at least 2 parallel versions: stable and unstable series of releases.
  2. It should be easy to migrate all bugs "forward" in their versions. This should not generate huge amounts of spam. We also need to be able to kill off old versions - and migrate bugs - when they are obsolete.
  3. It is desirable to have a distinction between a bug being absent from a release series, and the existence of a bug being unknown in a release series. Then, during unstable development, we can distinguish between a bug introduced in the unstable series (2.3) and bugs in the old stable series (2.2) that are still present. If the old stable series (2.2) is still being developed on and having releases, this is quite important information. Having this information has the extra advantage that you can query for known regressions.

    Note that even if 80% of bugs remain on "Unknown" for all versions apart from one, even this is better for 20% of the bugs than the current situation.

Current situation

We use GNOMEVER2.x keywords to represent "a bug is present in such-and-such a release of GNOME."

  1. This is super-extendable - it works fine with multiple series of releases.
  2. It causes masses of SPAM if you try to kill off an old version. Editing stuff directly in the database has caused problems in the past (remember "triaged", "bug_squad").
  3. If a bug is marked 2.3, at the moment, we don't know if it is verified not present in 2.2 or unreported in 2.2.  A lot of the time it's sort-of-obvious from the report, but when doing bugzilla-wide queries, you can't read each report separately. You need the information in the bug.

Proposed solution

This requires our new bugzilla version, which will (hopefully) have custom fields.

The proposed solution is to have custom fields - simply "Present in GNOME 2.2" and "Present in GNOME 2.3", each with the possible values "Yes", "No" and "Unknown." (default). This makes it super-easy to
find bugs that need triaging - simply search for "Unknown" in either field.

It rather assumes that custom fields:

If this is actually the case, I do not know. This all becomes void if it's not.

Issues

To discuss this, mail bugsquad.