[Bloat] Please enter issues into the issue tracker - Issue system organisation needed.

[Jim Gettys]

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