Xen devel - May 2013 - [ANNOUNCE] Alpha release of bug tracking service http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/

For a long time the preferred method for reporting bugs to the Xen
project has been to send email to the xen-devel mailing list[0] rather
than using a more formal bug tracker[1]. In many cases this lightweight
process works well however it does not work so well for more complex
bugs or lower priority bugs since they tend to fall through the cracks.

To address this shortcoming I am pleased to introduce an alpha of our
new mailing list based bug tracking service:
        http://bugs.xenproject.org/xen/

The system is based entirely around the xen-devel mailing list and
retains the initial lightweight, email based, work flow while allowing
issues to easily be escalated to the bug tracker in cases where this
process is not sufficient.

Although I hope to avoid it it this is an Alpha release and therefore it
may be necessary to reset the database to a pristine state before
declaring the service production ready. However I am very interested in
people trying the service out and giving me feedback.

Information for users
====================
Please continue to report bugs to the xen-devel@ mailing list as
described in http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Reporting_Bugs_against_Xen

Once a report has been triaged on the list then it will either be fixed
already (!) or can be registered with the BTS to be tracked.

If you want to add information to an existing bug please use the "Reply
to this message" links beneath each message on the bug log.

In the longer term we would also like to develop a command line tool
developed which guides users through the process of gathering logs,
describing the bug and sending mail to the list (something similar to
Debian reportbug, incorporating aspects of the existing, but under
maintained, xen-bugtool). If you are interested in helping to develop
this tool please mail xen-devel@ and CC me

Information for developers
=========================
When a user reports a bug to the mailing list please triage it in the
usual way (i.e. with an initial back and forth discussion with the
submitter). Once you are satisfied that the bug is real (i.e. it isn''t
fixed in a newer version, isn''t a local configuration error etc) and if
you feel it would be useful to track (because you are unable to fix it
right now or whatever) then please feel to create a bug to track the
relevant (sub)thread.

For information on managing bugs (including registering them) please
see:
        http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Bug_Management_Interface

Access Control
=============
During the initial alpha phase most write access (including create,
reopen, severity and setting the owner) is limited to developers only. I
have seeded the initial permissions list from the MAINTAINERS file.

Irrespective of this it is expected/intended that even in the long term
users will continue to report bugs to the mailing list.

Alpha Release
============
The software used to provide this service is Free Software and is
available at https://gitorious.org/emesinae/emesinae. It is in the early
stages of development and will continue to evolve to suit our needs.

Ian.

[0] http://lists.xen.org/mailman/listinfo/xen-devel
[1] A bugzilla instance exists but is unused by most developers.