Open Stack

Hey everyone!

Over the past few months there's been an increase in the number of patches without bug reports, and a decrease in the number of backports. I wanted to take a moment to explain why bug reports are useful, not just bureaucracy, and how they link to backports.

Bug reports help in a few ways:
- They can contain logs, images and discussion about the nature of a bug that helps reviewers do their job faster. This kind of verbosity is ideal for a bug report, but not suited to a commit message. Generally, the bug report should provide information about the *problem*, while the commit message provides information about the *solution*.
- For most people, bug reports are much easier to search than parsing git logs. Remember that not everyone is a git wizard.
- The tagging system allows us to mark things for backporting, with tags like "ocata-backport-potential". The tag system is currently how I manage most of our backports.
- Bugs that have been correctly closed (i.e. "Fix Released") and targeted to a milestone (i.e. "Pike-3") provide helpful metrics for how the project is progressing.

In most cases, a bug is *required* on a patch. If the patch is extremely small and self-explanatory - things like whitespace cleanup and typos - then we have no need to hold them up. Aside from that, I expect cores to please ask for bug reports to be added, and where necessary, target them to a milestone and add tags for service knowledge, backporting etc. Otherwise, I have to manually go through all of the recent merged changes looking for eligible backports, rather than just clicking the "ocata-backport-potential" tag.

Thanks,
Rob
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