[maemo-community] Validity criteria for bugtrackers and bugtrackers links

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 08 March 2010 15:29:51 Valerio Valerio wrote:
> since some developers aren't taking seriously the QA rules and there's a
> lot of room for different interpretations in some cases, like the validity
> of the bugtracker fields, the Testing Squad decided to write some
> additional rules to clarify dubious situations:
> http://wiki.maemo.org/Bugtracker

I disagree with this rule:

These bugtrackers link are considered NOT valid:

    * General links that do not lead to a dedicated page (e.g. 
http://talk.maemo.org or https://bugs.maemo.org)

There should not be restrictions on the type or location of a bugtracker to 
use.  Any URL at which you can provide the bug report information should be 
acceptable.  For example, in the GPE apps I point to the upstream bugtracker.  
There is no need to point to a page because this is all about GPE.  The user 
will probably want to search, they may know which GPE component they should 
report it against (e.g. one of the applets or libraries, not necessarily the 
component they actually installed) and, if not, they can choose the product 
itself when they enter the bug report and I will reassign it as necessary.

Other upstreams may have completely different bugtrackers which work 
differently.

I really don't even see any problem with just pointing to t.m.o or b.m.o.

By all means give advice that it MAY be helpful to provide a bugtracker link 
with a product name, and is particularly recommended when using b.m.o. And/or 
particularly for applications with large numbers of users.  But it is not a 
showstopper.  Leave it up to the developer.

It is marginal as to whether a bugtracker should be required at all.  I think 
it should, because it is easy and extremely helpful to the user, but only if 
it is left up to the developer what form it takes.  If a developer wants to 
use something different from normal then that is fine.  All we should require 
is that they have had to explicitly do something.

Graham