I stopped keeping track because it got depressing. Here's the tally for the last two days (granted, it was a weekend... but I was trying not to spend too much time on Mozilla stuff):
Summary: I need to uncc myself off some of those thousands of bugs.
What's a reasonable amount of time (say per week) to expect someone to spend on reading bugmail, bugs (possibly as a result of bugmail), patches, Mozilla newsgroups, Mozillazine forums, Mozillazine article talkbacks, etc? How much do people spend? I include time spent posting to the above lists and forums in "time spent reading."
I'll attempt to keep track of this for a few days (with the caveat that I'm trying to minimize the amount of time I spend on such pursuits; for example I no longer read any of the Mozillazine forums)... I'll be posting the results sometime.
To somewhat rip off Tom Lehrer, "By the time Galois was my age he had been dead for over three years."
Touching nsHTMLTokens and nsHTMLTokenizer is not good
for sanity. The worst part is, it's about as clean as it can be given what it
has to deal with.
Just to expand on my previous post... Bugzilla offers a number of features and a number of annoyances. In fact, anything that's not a feature but generates bugmail is an annoyance, in my opinion.
From a developer's point of view, the features (and I only list features which generate bugmail below; searching and such are not on the "possible annoyance" list) are:
From a project manager's (drivers') point of view, I think the features would be:
From a QA perspective, the features are:
From a user perspective, the features are:
Note that for many operations only some of those groups are interested in the bugmail. Also note that many people wear multiple hats (the developer+QA+user combination being rather common, as well as the QA+user combination).
The bugzilla comments that tend to piss people off are the ones that fall into the "annoyance" category for all of the classes of users involved—mass-changes, pointless tracking bugs, cc-munging, etc, etc.