bugtrackers and lots of comments.

Some things I'd really love to see to improve the usefulness of bugzilla (and other bugtrackers)

• Comment nesting.
  Basically multiple "Reply to this comment" buttons, one after each post, instead of one "post a new comment" button.
  
• A "collapse this thread in *my* view of this bug".
  Useful for ignoring inconsequential stuff that people may post to the bug. "HEY! I SAW A KERNEL OOPS ONCE TOO!"
  
• (going a bit crazy now). Comments Points/Moderation/Scoring.
  Vote down a comment so it gets auto-collapsed in everyones view of the bug.
  

(This is beginning to sound like the bastard child of bugzilla & digg/slashdot, so I'll stop here).

I've had these thoughts a few times over the last few years triaging kernel bugs for Fedora. I think they would be worth additions especially for the instances of a single bug that gets many people jumping on it. Especially high profile issues like the current e1000e scare that has a bunch of people worried.
(Though the Fedora bug tracking that problem is quite tame in comparison to the ubuntu one right now. I actually pity those guys having to wade through all those comments, with so much not-directly-useful-or-relevant commentary).

But we've had issues in the past in Fedora where we've easily had over 100 comments. Trying to keep up with what's going on when there are 16 different people all with slightly different (or even completely different in some cases) problems is nearly impossible after a point. On a number of occasions, I've just closed the bug with a comment along the lines of "guys, this is madness, please file individual bugs, and we'll work through them".

Part of the problem is context. If all I had to do was look at that one bug, and work on it, it wouldn't be such a big deal. Due to there being more bugs than developers (in any distro), time-slicing occurs, and regaining 'state' when loading up a bug again takes a while. When there's pages and pages of comments, it's sometimes impossible to regain the full picture just due to the amount of noise.

Syndicated 2008-09-24 22:54:16 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.