https://github.com/mozilla/treeherder/blob/149d01ac1c804b99730d22ea8cedafd556f6edae/treeherder/intermittents_commenter/constants.py has Bugzilla products and constants for which the intermittent bug commenter will adjust the priority to "--" if it's a priority 4 or 5 and set the whiteboard that the issue needs an owner (if it hasn't one yet).

The list looks manually maintained, so auto-adding/removing components won't work. Should the list of products and components get downloaded from Bugzilla and warnings be logged if a component from the list is missing or bugzilla got a new component for a list of given products (while checking that components are either in lists if the commenter is either enabled or disabled)? Does anybody read the logs/gets notified if there are warnings?

This probably should be removed in favor of an API call to Bugzilla. We don't actively look at the papertrail logs unless there is a problem, however we do receive notifications if an exception has been logged for the Intermittents Commenter.

Core alone has 135 components, so querying an entire product doesn't seem feasible. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/rest/product/core
The only way I could see this working is if all relevant ones had a tag or grouping (that could be queried) to indicate the commenter should only look at those components.

Regarding outdated components in the hard-coded list, since the commenter is retrieving bugzilla bugs and checking if they belong to one of the components, if a component no longer exists it won't have a negative effect. However, if a new component needs to be added someone will need to manually update the file.

Joel, do you have any thoughts on this?

this list of components is a whitelist of components that are needswork:owner, which means that the owners should be triaging them, not sheriffs.

We should check if that is still valid, a lot of staffing changes have taken place in the last couple years.

If it is all accurate, then I am not sure what else to do here. Are we concerned that some intermittent bugs are not getting priority/whiteboard set?

:gbrown, did I get that right?
:aryx, what is the problem we are trying to solve?

I think the intent of this bug was to provide an automated check that the needswork:owner components still exist in bugzilla. As jmaher points out, that's only part of the issue: A bugzilla component may still exist, but its triage owner may not want to be part of the needswork:owner initiative...may not even know what needswork:owner is about.

My recollection is that needswork:owner was a trial program: We approached some triage owners and asked if they would triage their intermittents and give us feedback on the experience; we hoped to expand that approach to all components / triage owners, one day. And then we wandered off...

So it might be better to resolve bug 1544278 first: Decide if needswork:owner still has value, and if it doesn't, remove the code and list of components completely; if it is still relevant, verify the list of components with affected triage owners, then contemplate the automated component check in this bug.

Removing myself from this for now based on Geoff's comment.

too long with no comment/action