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Migrating to Taskcluster: work underway!

Mozilla’s build and test infrastructure has relied on Buildbot as the backbone of our systems for many years. Asking around, I heard that we started using Buildbot around 2008. The time has come for a change!

Many of the people working on migrating from Buildbot to Taskcluster gathered all together for the first time to talk about migration this morning. (A recording of the meeting is available)

The goal of this work is to shut down Buildbot and identify a timeline. Our first goal post is to eliminate the Buildbot Scheduler by moving build production entirely into TaskCluster, and scheduling tests in TaskCluster.

Today, most FirefoxOS builds and tests are in Taskcluster. Nearly everything else for Firefox is driven by Buildbot.

Our current tracker bug is ‘Buildbot -> TaskCluster transition‘. At a high level, the big projects underway are:

We have quite a few things to figure out in the Windows and Mac OS X realm where we’re interacting with hardware, and some work is left to be done to support Windows in AWS. We’re planning to get more clarity on the work that needs to be done there next week.

The bugs identified seem tantalizingly close to describing most of the issues that remain in porting our builds. The plan is to have a timeline documented for builds to be fully migrated over by Whistler! We are also working on migrating tests, but for now believe the Buildbot Bridge will help us get tests out of the Buildbot scheduler, even if we continue to need Buildbot masters for a while. An interesting idea about using runner to manage hardware instead of the masters was raised during the meeting that we’ll be exploring further.

If you’re interested in learning more about TaskCluster and how to use it, Chris Cooper is running a training on Monday June 1 at 1:30pm PT.

Ping me on IRC, Twitter or email if you have questions!

mozilla ,

pushlog from last night, a brief look at Try

One of the mysterious and amazing parts of Mozilla’s Release Engineering infrastructure is the Try server, or just “Try”. This is how Firefox and FirefoxOS developers can push changes to Mozilla’s large build and test system, made up of about 3000 servers at any time. There are a couple amazing things about this — one is that anyone can request access to push to try, not just core developers or Mozilla employees. It is a publicly-available system and tool. Second is that a remarkable amount of control is offered over which builds to produce and which tests are run. Each Try run could consume 300+ hours of machine time if every posible build and test option is selected.

This blog post is a brain dump from a few days of noodling and a quick review of of the pushlog for Try, which shows exactly the options developers are choosing for their Try runs.

To use Try, you need to include a string of configuration that looks something like this in your topmost hg commit:

try: -b do -p emulator,emulator-jb,emulator-kk,linux32_gecko,linux64_gecko,macosx64_gecko,win32_gecko -u all -t none

That’s a recommended string for B2G developers from the Sheriff best practices wiki page. If you’re interested in how this works, the code for the try syntax parser itself is here.

You can include a Try configuration string in an empty commit, or as the last part of an existing commit message. What most developers tell me they do is have a an empty commit with the Try string in it, and they remove the extra commit before merging a patch. From all the feedback I’ve read and heard, I think that’s probably what we should document on the wiki page for Try, and maybe have a secondary page with “variants” for those that want to use more advanced tooling. KISS rule seems to apply here.

If you’re a regular user of Try, you might have heard of the high scores tracker. What you might not know is that there is a JSON file behind this page and it contains quite a bit of history that’s used to generate that page. You can find it if you just replace ‘.html’ with ‘.json’.

Something about the 8-bit ambiance of this page that made me think of “texts from last night”. But in reality, Try is most busy during typical Pacific Time working hours.

The high scores page also made me curious about the actual Try strings that people were using. I pulled them all out and had a look at what config options were most common.

Of the 1262 pushes documented today in that file:

  • 760 used ‘-b do’ meaning both Debug and Opt builds are made. I wonder whether this should just be the default, or we should have some clear recomendations about what developers should do here.
  • 366 used ‘-p all’ meaning build on 28 platforms, and produce 28 binaries. Some people might intend this, but I wonder if some other default might be more helpful.
  • 456 used ‘-u all’ meaning that all the unit tests were run.
  • 1024 used ‘-t none’ reflecting the waning use of Talos tests.

I’m still thinking about how to use this information. I have a few ideas:

  • Change the defaults for a minimal try run
  • Make some commonly-used aliases for things like “build on B2G platforms” or “tests that catch a lot of problems”
  • Create a dashboard that shows TopN try syntax strings
  • update the parser to include more of the options documented on various wiki pages as environment variables

If you’re a regular user of Try, what would you like to see changed? Ping me in #releng, email or tweet your thoughts!

And some background on me: I’ve been working with the Release Engineering team since April 1, 2015, and most of that time so far was spent on #buildduty, a topic I’m planning to write a few blog posts about. I’m also having a look at planning for the Task Cluster migration (away from BuildBot), monitoring and developer environments for releng tooling. I’m also working on a zine to share at Whistler of what is going on when you push to Try. Finally, I stood up a bot for reporting alerts through AWS SNS and to be able to file #buildduty related bugzilla bugs.

My goal right now is to find ways of communicating about and sharing the important work that Release Engineering is doing. Some of that is creating tracker bugs and having meetings to spread knowlege. Some of that is documenting our infrastructure and drawing pictures of how our systems interact. A lot of it is listening and learning from the engineers who build and ship Firefox to the world.

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My recent op-ed published about Portland and startups

I was featured in the Portland Business Journal last Friday! I wrote an essay on startups and the experiences of women in the Portland tech community that have caused me to not refer women into startups for jobs unless the startups are run by fellow PyLadies.

Some excerpts:

It takes more than one CEO’s alleged behavior to cause 56 percent of women to leave technology related fields by mid-career, according to a Harvard Business Review study. That’s twice the rate that men leave the tech industry.

After all, 63 percent of women in STEM industries (science, technology engineering and math) have experienced sexual harassment, according to a 2008 study.

I can’t recommend that women work for startups in Portland.

Startup funders should keep holding executives accountable. Company cultures grow from the seeds planted by their leaders.

These companies need [qualified HR, skilled with workforce diversity issues], and our tech leaders should demand it.

Read the whole thing at the Portland Business Journal’s site!

personal 1 Comment

Some thoughts on handling harassment and toxic behavior privately

I’ve seen some calls for people like @shanley to handle their complaints about abuse and harassment privately, or maybe “more privately” than they have. So, today I just mused aloud for a few minutes on Twitter the thoughts I have about private handling of public acts of cruelty, harassment and abuse. Here’s those tweets, slightly edited, in a blog form. This is meant as a discussion of why public responses to public harassment are not only justified, but helpful. I don’t believe that those who are harassed are obligated in any way to respond publicly to harassment.

Why is it important to “handle in private” the responses to public odious, toxic, anti-social and harassing behavior? How does that help?

I believe in proportionate response. However, when the interactions are online and there is no physical public space, just “public media”, there’s a serious problem with the idea that a private response, particularly from the harassed, works at all.

My experience has been that private responses to people who harass me don’t help. Harassment continues, the harasser does not change. The only thing that has ever “changed behavior” is directing a complaint through the public or someone with authority over the harasser. And, that only worked for me a small percentage of the time that I asked for help. Asking for help has also increased harassment.

I’m not sold on the idea of private responses to public acts shared on the internet as “effective for behavior change”.

There’s also a difference between individual behavior change (personal reform), and cultural change (what we find acceptable as a group). Not everyone is aboard the cultural change train. And, I see twitter in particular as performance art, not a conversation happening “inside” a community.

The more time I spend thinking about this, the more I realize I haven’t spent enough time defining what my community is. Because for a long time I bought into the idea that there was some kind of global FOSS community protecting me, caring for me, backing me up.

But what I believe now is that I have a few close friends, some who know each other, some who don’t — but not a coherent community. And the reason why I don’t think there’s coherency, is because they don’t respond the way that a community does when there’s danger.

There is real, lasting damage done to people I care about by harassers and abusers. Things I hear about afterward, things that make me ill to think about and repeat. Things I wish I could prevent. That we could all prevent. But the worst damage done, I think, happens when those who come forward aren’t believed.

I didn’t go into detail about this in the twitter thread, but I have found that many people, who I come in contact with through FOSS, who are abusive on social media and on public mailing lists, are also abusive and harassing in private. Assuming that the public behavior is the worst behavior that a harasser exhibits is not a safe or reasonable assumption.

So. Handling things in public when we’re dealing with public acts, cruelty, harassment: Yes, I think we should.

personal 2 Comments

Personal email sabbatical, July 10 – October 15 2014

Starting July 10, 2014, I’m planning to take a personal email sabbatical.

I’m going to unsubscribe from all mailing lists and redirect all email to my personal email addresses (chesnok.com and gmail.com) to /dev/null.

I have a couple open source project addresses that will probably be redirected to people responsible for those areas during my sabbatical. The traffic on those addresses is so low, however, that this is likely not going to impact anyone significantly.

I will not be reachable via personal email until sometime around October 15, 2014.

Why I’m doing this:

I spend too much time responding to things that other people want me to do.

I have a full-time job where I do that already, and as a result, much of my personal time where I could be creative is spent in the service of others. I’m also about to have a baby! So, it seems like as good a time as any to make an explicit departure from the communication medium that’s been the focus of my life since about 1995.

I’m not sure that I will return to having a public email address outside of work.

I plan to continue blogging, although using a much simplified blogging platform that I’ve written (but haven’t deployed yet :D). I plan to continue to use Twitter, although I’ve separated public and private accounts. I do not plan to increase my use of other social media. I plan to continue to use IRC, although will likely take myself out of most project channels. I’ve removed Twitter from my phone, and plan to remove email from it in July.

I’m taking a cue from danah boyd, although not following her prescription for a lengthy advance notice to collaborators.

I spent the last six months substantially downsizing my volunteer commitments, spending more time on in-person events that are local. I am pretty sure most people won’t even notice my extended volunteer absence on the “greater internet”. I’ll trickle out some individual notices as needed, probably to anyone I’ve had more than three exchanges with in the last two or three years.

personal 4 Comments

Things I’ve learned from my personal trainer

I’ve been seeing a personal trainer for the last couple of years. I injured my back pretty seriously 5-6 years ago, and finally admitted that I had a “real problem” that required doctor and other professional intervention. After x-rays and a couple months more of denial, I started an exercise program focused on weight training.

Previously, my main (and sometimes only) exercise had been running. The back problem I have caused my doctor to recommend that I never run again. At first this was an easy thing to do because running was incredibly painful. Later, I realized that running was not only a fitness thing for me, but also an important part of my mental health. I really needed another way to get in a lot of exercise.

I go to the gym 3 times a week, and I try to walk about 5 miles a day at least 3 additional days a week. Playing Ingress, and bird watching tend to make this pretty easy.

I’m now 7-months pregnant, and I still do both things. I typically don’t get any 10k days in like I did before I was pregnant, but apart from some grueling travel I did in April, I’ve been able to keep it up the entire time.

I’ve threatened to give a talk about this, but rather than wait to assemble all of this until then, I thought it would be nice to just write it down in the event it helps someone else!

My physical activity background:

I did first ballet, then karate and judo as a child. I never played any ball or team sports, and did not learn to swim other than barely keep myself afloat until I was an adult. In high school, I ran cross country for three seasons. Mostly I played the violin, at least 2 hours a day sometimes up to 5 hours a day, which is a physically tiring activity, but not aerobic (usually). I also hiked and backpacked with my family. I was able to run a 7-7:30 minute mile until a couple years after I graduated from college. In general, I thought of myself as a pretty fit person, and ran slower because no coach was yelling at me and no competitors were chasing me as I got older. The last time I seriously “trained” was for a marathon I ended up not running in about 2005. I got myself up to 18 miles and then just cycled about 8 miles a day to and from work for many years.

So, by the time I decided to get a trainer I was not in very good shape.

Here’s the stuff that I learned right away:

  • I did not know how to lift things. “Lift with your legs” is what people say. I did not know what this really meant, and was doing some strange combination of using my quads and my lower back to lift heavy things. That’s pretty much exactly what you should not do.
  • My shoulders were incredibly weak. Part of that was from typing all day for my work and being tense. Another part was just lack of use.
  • My lack of grip strength was causing me a lot pain in my hands and forearms. I’d overuse my wrists and hands every day, and then go back and do it again. I didn’t quite have carpal tunnel, but it was probably coming pretty soon.
  • I was very embarrassed by my lack of basic knowledge in the gym. I’m pretty good with jargon, but holy shit, gym language was complicated. And didn’t map to anything I already knew. The names of the exercises were not helpful to me, and I found myself drawing lots of stick figure pictures to try to remember how to do things properly. I didn’t know the names of equipment, I couldn’t remember the difference between a barbell and a dumbbell, I could not for the life of me recall an exercise if I took more than about a week-long break from it.
  • Strengthening my back causes a lot of soreness that can easily be confused with bad pain. I was terrified at first that I was going to reinjure myself and was extremely cautious about any kind of back “pain” I experienced. Over time I figured out the difference between muscle soreness and real, “don’t do that” kind of pain. But it took me nearly a year to feel confident that I can (mostly) tell the difference.
  • I will never be able to perform a new exercise perfectly the first time. And I really need to be ok with that. As a person who regularly masters new technical skills with little or no help from colleagues or friends, it’s regularly an embarrassing and humbling experience to go to the gym.
  • “Testing out” injuries to joints doesn’t help anything. I am able to hyperextend most of my joints, including my wrists. I’d injured my wrists and had to do pushups and things like that from my fists for many months. When I first discovered I was injured, I kept “testing” which likely was just reinjuring myself over and over. It took probably 8 weeks the first time, and maybe 4 weeks the second time to recover from wrist injuries enough that I could do open-handed pushups. Learning to avoid the avoidable reinjuries was extremely helpful.

So what are the kinds of facts that I wish I would have known earlier in my life?

  • “Lift with your legs” basically means “lift by squeezing your glutes.” These are usually the largest muscles in your body, and basically they are your butt muscles. As my glutes have gotten stronger, my back pain has entirely gone away. In the last two years, I have had two incidents requiring more than a couple hours worth of recovery time. Previous to weight lifting, I’d needed sometimes 5 days to be able to stand up properly from a couch. While injured, I’d had to roll myself down to the floor and slowly push my entire body up, barely able to stand. Of course, this is specific to the injury I have. However, a lot of people sit in terrible chairs, hunched over computers all day and they could really benefit from learning how to strengthen their glutes.
  • Increasing glute strength through barbell lifting from a standing position (squats, deadlifts mostly) improved my posture dramatically. I now get people saying things in passing like “you have great posture”, something that I NEVER heard for the first 35 or so years of my life.
  • I need a lot of protein first thing in the morning to feel well through out the day. I eat two eggs every morning, usually also some yogurt and fruit. Cereal does not cut it. Oatmeal can sometimes be ok if combined with a bunch of other things.
  • Pain does not necessarily mean you are injured. You might just need to stretch something out.
  • Lifting weights when you feel like crap often will make you feel much much better.
  • It doesn’t take very long to get really strong. Within three months, I had dramatic improvements in basic stuff like being able to lift boxes of heavy stuff.
  • Grip strength improves amazingly as you increase the weight of barbell and dumbell lifts. I rarely feel pain in my hands and forearms anymore, and I have a pretty crushing grip.
  • I work best with minimal verbal cues, a lot of physical queues (poking muscles, mostly) and being able to see someone try to do something before I try it. As an obsessive reader, it never occurred to me that in the physical world, I would mostly require this kind of instruction. The bigger realization was probably that demonstration was extremely effective for me, more effective than: telling me to do something, being observed doing it, and getting feedback. Part of that is my a lack of gym vocabulary, but I also really need to see each exercise before I am able to mimic proper form (and ask a ton of questions).
  • Foam rollers are amazing. I foam roll a bunch of things before I work out and sometimes at home. Currently I’m focused on my IT-bands and quads, and sometimes I roll out parts of my arms. My elbows started pinging when I started increasing the weights I used for curls. After I was able to do curls with something like a 55-lb barbell, the tightness and pain went away.

Anyway, so that’s the stuff that I know now. I have said to myself that I wished I would have gotten into weight lifting earlier in life. But, to be honest, I don’t know that I would have been that into it without an enthusiastic teacher and a group of people encouraging me to do it. Now, I feel pretty good about independent physical activity, and I can afford to pay someone to help me stay on track.

I’m also extremely fortunate to be able to continue to lift while I’m quite pregnant. I’ve dramatically reduced the weight I lift for squats and deadlifts, after my doctor freaked out and told me I really shouldn’t be lifting so much.

If I ever get pregnant again, I might try to do some research and figure out what my real limits should be on this. Some current wisdom on this says that you should only do lifts that work your abdominals and lower body at about 60% of your max while pregnant. I have no idea where that comes from, and sincerely wish there was more than just hearsay and fear related to lifting while pregnant. There’s of course a lot of documentation of how bad injuries to a woman’s pelvic floor can be while pregnant, so there’s real science backing up the urge for caution. But if you’re otherwise very strong, I’m not sure that the freakouts about specific weight are warranted (if you’re healthy and not trying to achieve personal bests :D) any more than freaking out about women running until they give birth is called for.

I’ve been also thinking about the ways in which gym discipline has affected how I think about teaching and programming, but that’s a topic for another post!

devops, presentation , , 2 Comments

Monitorama 2014 wrapup

I’m just settling back into the daily routine after RelEng/RelOps’ workweek and then Monitorama back-to-back.

Videos will eventually be posted here.

I thought it was awesome the conference started with some #hugops.

Here are my highlights:

  • I gave a talk about crontabber! I have my speakers notes if you’re interested!

  • Dan Slimmons gave a nice talk about basic probability and how understanding the difference between sensitivity and specificity can help you choose more useful alerts. It was super basic stats stuff, but a good foundation for building up stats competency in teams.

  • James Mickens gave a hilarious talk about the cloud that is well-worth finding when it goes up.

  • Ashe Dryden gave a talk about gender issues and “our most wicked problem”. It was very well-received by the audience, which was gratifying for me personally. I think the audience walked away with some very practical things to do: speak up among peers when someone says things that make you uncomfortable and ask questions about equal treatment in your company for things like salary, perks and benefits.

  • Several talks were given about monitoring and managing ops inside companies. My favorite was from Daniel Schauenberg (contributor to statsd) of Etsy. and Scott Sanders spoke about similar topics in this presentaton on Github’s outage lifecycle. And related, but not at the conference, Heroku just published an incident response runbook.

  • There was a hilarious lightning talk about the failure of the Swedish ship Vasa as an object lesson for massive project failure. Here’s a link to the case study the lightning talk was based on.

  • Larry Price (@laprice) gave a 5-minute talk about Postgres autovacuum tuning, which was awesome, and I hope he posts the slides. It reminded me that I should do a couple brownbags about Postgres config this summer!

  • I was struck by how many people said they used Postgres in production. Someone else asked the question during a talk, and nearly half the audience raised their hands.

  • InfluxDB, a new timeseries database emphasizing an HTTP API (remind anyone of CouchDB? :D), seemed interesting, although maybe rough around the edges when it came to documenting useful features/best practices. When I mentioned it on Twitter, I found a few folks already trying to use it in production and got at least one bug filed. 🙂

  • I also saw an amazing demo of Kibana, which seems like a very interesting dashboard/investigation/querying interface to Elastic Search. I watched a friend deploy it in about an hour to look at their ES systems last Wednesday.

  • Dashing from Shopify was also very interesting, although a rubyist project, so not easy to integrate with our Pythonic world. However, putting on a contributor relations hat — it could be a wonderful and beautiful way for contributors to interact with our many APIs.

I’m looking forward to the videos coming out and a list of slide decks, as I missed a few talks during hallway track conversations. I met several people who are managing similar or larger event loads than we do with Socorro, so it was fun swapping stories and seeing how their software stacks are evolving. RabbitMQ was a weapon of choice for reporting environments, along with Storm. Lots of love for Kafka was out there for the people dealing with real-time customer response.

Overall, highly recommend attending Monitorama to dip a toe into the state of the art with regard to system operations, monitoring and ops management.

socorro 3 Comments

The Final Crontab: an introduction to crontabber

I gave a talk at Monitorama today about crontabber. (slides)

My coworker tells me that I left out the part of “why you should care” about crontabber from my first few slides. So here’s a list:

  • Retries jobs on failure automatically
  • Dependency-aware, and won’t execute child jobs that depend on parents that have failed
  • Nagios integration including support for WARNINGs and CRITICALs, and configurable escalation from WARNING to CRITICAL (e.g. 3 WARNINGS == CRITICAL).

Those three are probably the top features sysadmins who are not happy with how cron is managing jobs wish they had.

Crontabber needs at least Python 2.6, Postgres 9.2, is FOSS and being used in production. We’ve used a version of the code since February 2013, and currently have the python module version you can install with pip install crontabber is currently running in our stage environment.

Let us know what you think!

releng , , 3 Comments

Release Engineering: A draft of an architecture diagram

One of the things that I like to do is create architecture diagrams of complicated systems.

We had Release Engineering and Release Operations in the Portland Mozilla office this week, providing a perfect opportunity to pick everyone’s brains about what the current state of our release infrastructure is like.

Behold: releng flow onepage

And here’s a version that includes some “tree closure reasons” in magenta:

Releng infra with tree closure reason codes

A tree closure is defined as an hg hook that prevents people from committing to a tree (like mozilla-central). It looks up status at treestatus.mozilla.org to figure out whether or not the tree is closed, and this value is updated manually by “sheriffs” who track tree status.

And the an initial key to the tree closure reasons (the numbers on the magenta blobs), is documented on the Mozilla wiki.

The goal of this document was to take brain dump information from everyone in the meeting, and create a relationship diagram of all the systems that everyone here supports. As you can see, it is pretty complex.

What I took away from creating this was:

  • The cognitive load is very high for trying to diagnose the root cause for several kinds of tree closures.
  • People loved being able to look at how each systems related to the others.
  • No single person really had a model in their head of how everything represented in this diagram was related.

There’s a lot more work to do to link in documentation and create some related diagrams, which I’ll tackle next week. The kinds of questions I’d like to try to answer based on the information that I’ve gathered include:

  • How does my patch get a build created for it?
  • What single points of failure can we mitigate?
  • What kinds of resilience do we need for our typical transient failures?

I really enjoyed identifying sources of tree closure and the kinds of failures that cause it. These are the kinds of problems I love working on solving — complicated, often unpredictable and largely driven by the normal work that people need to do to get their jobs done. There’s rarely a simple solution to things like experimental patches taking down large portions of a build infrastructure, and how we solve, or at least mitigate, these problems is fascinating.

python

Python Core Summit: notes from my talk today

I gave a short talk today about new coders and contributors to developer documentation today. Here are my notes!

Me: Selena Deckelmann Data Architect, Mozilla Major contributor to PostgreSQL, PyLadies organizer in Portland, OR

Focusing on Documentation, Teaching and Outreach

Two main forks of thought around teaching and outreach: 1. Brand new coders: PyLadies, Software Carpentry and University are the main communities represented 2. New contributors to Python & ecosystem

1. Brand new coders: PyLadies, Software Carpentry and University are the main communities represented

(a) Information architecture of the website

Where do you go if you are a teacher or want to teach a workshop? Totally unclear on python.org. Really could use a section on the website for this, microsite.

Version 2 vs 3 is very confusing for new developers. Most workshops default to 2, some workshops now require 3. Maybe mark clearly on all workshops which version. Generally this is a very confusing issue when encountering the site for the first time.

Possible solution: Completely separate “brand new coder” tutorial. Jessica McKellar would like to write this.

(b) Packaging and Installation problems — see earlier long conversation in this meeting about this. Many problems linked to having to compile C code while installing with pip

(c) New coder contribution can come through documenting of issues around install and setup. We could make this easier — maybe direct initial reports to stack overflow, and then float solutions to bugs.python.org

2. New contributors to Python & ecosystem — with a focus on things useful for keeping documentation and tutorials up-to-date and relevant

(a) GNOME Outreach Program for Women – Python is participating!

More people from core should participate as mentors! PSF is funding 2-3 students this cycle, Twisted has participated for a while and had a great experience. This program is great because:

  • Supports code and non-code contribution
  • Developer community seems very cohesive, participants seem to join communities and stick around
  • Strong diversity support
  • Participants don’t have to be students
  • Participants are paid for 3 months
  • Participants come from geographically diverse communities
  • To participate, applicants must submit a patch or provide some other pre-defined contribution before their application is even accepted

Jessica McKellar and Lynn Root are mentors for Python itself. See them for more details about this round! Selena is a coordinator and former mentor for Mozilla’s participation and also available to answer questions.

(b) Write the Docs conference is a python-inspired community around documentation.

(c) Openstack – Anne Gentle & her blog. 3-year participant in OpenStack community and great resource for information about building technical documentation community.

(d) Better tooling for contribution could be a great vector for getting new contributors.

  • Wiki is a place for information to go and die (no clear owners, neglected SEO etc) – Maybe separate documentation repos from core code repos for tutorials
  • carefully consider the approval process – put the people who are most dedicated to maintaining the tutorials in charge of maintaining them

(e) bugs.python.org

Type selection is not relevant to ‘documentation’ errors/fixes. Either remove ‘type’ from the UI or provide relevant types. I recommend removing ‘type’ as a required (or implied required) form field when entering a bug.

The larger issue here is around how we design for contribution of docs:

  • What language do we use in our input systems?
  • What workflow do we expect technical writers to follow to get their contributions included?
  • What is the approval process?

Also see the “tooling for contribution”