I get a lot of bug mail, way too much in my mind and I’m sure there are people out there getting much more bug mail than I do. The issue isn’t so much the amount of bug mail, though that’s often a problem. The real problem I have with bug mail is how often it’s completely useless.

Who are these people?

Lets start off with some better identity. I see a lot of names on bug mail for whom I have no idea who this person is.

I’ve noticed the bugzilla web interface has started to include a points system for people who comment on a bug. I don’t really know what the points mean but that doesn’t matter, I know higher is better. Somehow I’m at 16 points right now so I guess I should pay more attention to people with at least that many points. I actually read all the bug mail I get, but it would be nice to know if I could at least feel less guilty about not responding quickly.

Showing the points of the person making the change (and my points) in the bug mail would help this out a lot. I do also see some of the people who comment have titles like “Evince developer”, this would be another great thing to show in the bug mail.

Last part on identity, it’d also be great if there was a link included in the bug mail to this persons profile. I can’t seem to find the idea of a bugzilla profile though. One page about this person, their points, where they comment, what they are a developer of, if anything.

What just happened?

Removed: NEW – Added: NEEDINFO

Who you need info from would be a great addition which most likely requires lots of changes in bugzilla. However the least that could be done is to include the previous comment and commenter. I think that would help out a lot of other types of changes as well.

Bugzilla comments often work in the form of a conversation that slowly takes place in message board style. It’s like my roommates and I trying to coordinate feeding the cat on the cork board, a slow and painful process that could be easily solved with a minute or two of face to face time.

Below the current comment, prefaced with some text saying: Last Comment on $DATE by $PERSON [$PERSON_PROFILE] and then inline the last comment. Perhaps keeping a limit on the number of characters if you have a desire to keep the emails to a small size.

Anyway, I’m not intending to gripe about GNOME bugzilla as I do think it’s one of the nicest bugzillas I’ve used. Kudos to the developers! And I realize that bugzilla wasn’t really designed for interaction through email, which is too bad because I really think it’s the better way to go. This is just some of the fixes I’d been thinking about to improve my bug email usage, haven’t looked into if they are applicable to everyone.