Reopening others' bugs (Re: Closing of Fedora 11 Bugs at EOL)

[Matt McCutchen]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 18:29 -0700, an unknown sender wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 19:09 -0400, David Malcolm wrote:
> > Possibly bikeshedding here, but would it be better to change the wording
> > slightly:
> >   If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version
> > - of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version.
> > + of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug report, updating
> > + the "version" field accordingly.
> > 
> > i.e. are we referring to reopening that specific bug report within our
> > database, rather than in a more loose sense referring to opening a new
> > bug report against the same notional issue (if that makes sense).  As a
> > maintainer, I'd prefer to have the old unfixed report reopened, rather
> > than have a new bug report that's a duplicate; sometimes there's
> > valuable information in the comments.
> 
> The problem with that is that only the bug owner or someone with
> editbugs privileges (which happens to be quite a lot of people when it
> comes to Fedora, but definitely not all reporters) can change the
> version field.

Ah, yes.  I actually filed a bug against the "distribution" component in
March proposing that everyone be given permission to reopen bugs and
bump the version:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=573535

Bill Nottingham handed it over to the Red Hat Bugzilla product; I'm not
sure whether that was intended as a sign of assent.  Nothing has
happened since then.

Perhaps I should broaden the request to all bugs, not just zapped ones,
since there are some non-zapped bugs that I believe were closed for
bogus reasons but I cannot reopen, for example:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=185590
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=158575

It's easy to imagine that letting anyone reopen any Fedora bug would
lead to complete chaos, but our choice is in some sense really between
that and having duplicate bugs filed.  Either way, I am ready to rely on
the capacity of the admins to ban any Bugzilla user who abuses his/her
privileges.

Let me take this opportunity to also plug for my request to give zapped
bugs a status distinguishable from CLOSED WONTFIX:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528319

Thoughts on any of this?

-- 
Matt