Please enter issues into the issue tracker - Issue system organisation needed.
Jim Gettys
jg at freedesktop.org
Thu Feb 24 09:19:32 EST 2011
We have lots of different issues to track. We are uncovering more and
more with time, and the responsibility for the issues is all over the
Internet ecology.
These issues include drivers in multiple operating systems, queue
disciplines, OS distribution problems, broken networks, broadband gear,
ISP's with broken configurations, routers with broken configurations,
etc, etc, etc. Many of the responsible organizations are completely
unaware they have issues at the moment, and when they do wake up, the
need to have a work list. Serious as bufferbloat is, and generating
tremendous support costs as it does, it is hidden among most
organisations issue tracking as obscure, hard to explain problems, that
have heretofore defied analysis.
I think both for the sanity of the upstream open source projects and
companies that depend on it, commercial software and hardware vendors,
and our own sanity, it's time to start to keep track of these problems.
A simple example is in the following mail, where Juliusz identified a
bunch of Linux drivers with problems communicating back-pressure.
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat/2011-February/000036.html
These driver bugs, of course, can and will be worked upstream in the
project and/or responsible organisation; but from a practical point of
view, these issues aren't really going to be fixed until people can
actually take action on their own (by upgrading affected OS's, routers,
broadband gear, etc. as appropriate).
So I think we need to track bufferbloat issues in possibly a different
way (and maybe with a bit different work flow) than a usual tracking system.
First
=====
I think we need to capture what we know. I encourage people to start
entering issues in the bloat tracker found at:
http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/issues/new
Note that redmine lets us move issues from one (sub)project to another,
so we're best off capturing what we know immediately; we can sort and
redeal later.
Note: "We're all bozos on this glass bus, no stones allowed". We know
there are problems all over; issue descriptions should always be polite
and constructive, please!
Noting these issues will help people already involved (the mailing list
had > 120 people the last I looked, from large numbers of organisations)
take concrete action. Issues buried in mail threads are too easy to lose.
Second
======
As this effort grows, we'll need to organise the result, and delegate it
appropriately as the effort scales.
Today, we're probably best off with a single project: but we hope
certainly that won't be reasonable with time, possibly almost immediately.
We installed Redmine in particular as it has a competent issue tracking
system, as well as good (sub)project management, which can easily be
delegated to others (one of the huge problems with Bugzilla or Trac is
the lack of project management).
If anyone is looking for a way to help bufferbloat and has experience
with tracking systems on large, complex projects, I'd love to see
someone organise this effort, and put some thought and structure into
the categories, (sub)projects and work flow of issue states. I know from
my OLPC experience just how important this can be, though this is a
somewhat different situation.
Best regards,
- Jim
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