Re: Learning curves and such (was Re: pgFoundry)

Steve Atkins <steve(at)blighty(dot)com> writes:
> On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 12:07:14AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> It's not all that easy to make a test case for bugs involving concurrent
>> behavior. I'd go so far as to say that most of the seriously
>> interesting bugs that I've dealt with in this project were ones that the
>> original reporter didn't have a reproducible test case for.

> ...
> Some environments I've worked in, though, have had a stage between "bug
> submitted" and "bug passed to developer" where someone in QA makes an
> attempt to create a test case where one was not submitted with the bug.
> That was more the idea I was suggesting as a possibility - if someone has
> a QA itch to scratch then trolling postgresql-bugs for bugs without test
> cases and creating recreatable test cases to attach to those bugs might
> be a useful thing to do.

It's absolutely useful --- in fact, creating a case that fails at least
once-in-a-while is normally the first thing that a developer will try to
do when faced with this sort of report. But that effort doesn't always
require intimacy with the code, so farming it out is not a bad idea for
spreading the work around.

This certainly ties in with the recent discussions about "how can you
contribute when you haven't already learned all of the code base" ...
but to bring it back to the immediate topic, would a bugzilla or RT
system really help compared to our existing mailing-list system?
I've noticed Michael Fuhr and some other folk doing the confirm-bug-
and-provide-test-cases spadework recently, so it seems like this is
already something we can handle.

What it comes down to is that a mailing list encourages many-eyes-on-
one-bug synergy, whereas Bugzilla is designed to send a bug report
to just one pair of eyes, or at most a small number of eyes. I haven't
used RT but I doubt it's fundamentally different.

regards, tom lane