[maemo-community] [Bugsquad] Bugzilla reorganization draft: Call for Feedback

[From: timeless]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Andre Klapper <aklapper at openismus.com> wrote:
> I plan to put up a banner on all the Bugzilla pages a few days in
> advance and disable any bugmail for the time of implementing (as this
> will trigger hundreds of emails).

> Don't use Bugzilla at that time, nobody will get your email and you will
> likely run into errors.
> It's hard to estimate the time required for this - I should get the
> moving and some testing done in 4 or 5 hours (probably faster, I plan to
> create some dummy products in advance to save time), but I prefer to be
> on the safe side.

FWIW, for bmo we (4 people) used a window of very close to 6 hours for
a much larger reorganization. It pretty much fit the window. Power
even failed on us during the window we used (everyone was using fully
charged laptops and everyone had gprs connections in case we needed to
use them).

> I still wonder about the best time to do this - I'd prefer a sunday but
> I'm going to be off for the next three weekends, so I currently think of
> Monday, December 1st.

historically I've suggested holidays or equivalents. For mozilla's
reorg, we picked the last night of the Mozilla Summit (Thursday), a
time during which there should have been partying and such. We moved
it to wednesday because a rock slide took out the path home and
everything had to be moved forward a day. The advantage of this
placement was that all of the major contributors were busy and should
have been taking a break.

Other dates we've used historically include Christmas and New Year's
Eve. It depends on how big of a reorg you're doing.

If your community is US based, that means Thanksgiving or waiting
until Christmas. You can also check traffic logs to pick a day. I
think that Friday nights (timezone math is interesting) will probably
work, as most people are unlikely to be working "late" on a Friday.
Even some programmers have families, and the others have friends and
visit the real world for the beginning of the weekend.

Some other details about the reorg: we configured Bugzilla so that it
only answered requests from our ip's, which meant that everyone else
got a friendly "go away" message while we worked. This meant we didn't
have to tell people "please don't change bugs". (iirc this is mostly
done by ensuring the people who are doing work are listed as admins
and then setting the maintenance banner in editparams)

Note that in the process of any reorganization, some eggs will be
broken, I can count about 2 mistakes I made while reorganizing, and
they're both common:
1. always make sure you have similar or friendlier vote limitations on
any products you're creating or moving bugs to. Otherwise you're
*going* to delete people's votes (it happened in my bugs.maemo.org
reorg and it happened in the mozilla reorg).
2. if you're using flags, you need to make sure flags are allowed for
any products/components into which a bug might move.
3. you're going to want a backup of the database which can be used for
a couple of weeks after to deal w/ other errors, this isn't just a
database, you actually want to be able to have bugzilla running
readonly w/ the database so people can log in and check things.