Re: Cloning bugs: Just Don't Do It

[Rich Megginson]

On 11/03/2015 09:13 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with
> your cursor
>  hovering over it?
>
>  Don't do it! It's a trap.
>
>  Cloning a bug is almost never actually what you want to do. When you
>  clone a bug, all of the following are transferred to the new bug:
>
>  1. CCs
>  2. Description and comments, as one big ugly block as the new bug's
>  description
>  3. Pretty much all the metadata: whiteboard, keywords, tags,
>  dependencies. This includes stuff like blocker metadata, which is
>  almost never appropriate
>  4. External bug references
>  5. All sorts of other goddamn stuff
>
>  In my experience, you almost *never* actually wanted all of that.
>  Unless you really want a 2,000-line 'Description' which includes 50
>  comments and is entirely unreadable, everyone CCed on the old bug CCed
>  on the new bug, and all the metadata the same - just don't hit the
>  Clone button. Create a new bug and copy/paste anything relevant into
>  it.
>
>  In particular, Red Hat people, for the love of all that's holy, please
>  try not to clone Fedora bugs to RHEL unless it's really necessary! RHEL
>  bugs generate a metric assload of bureaucratic change emails that
>  Fedora contributors are almost never interested in. And no-one actually
>  likes trying to read those huge, unreadable clone bug Descriptions:
>  it's way, way nicer to create a new bug and cleanly summarize
>  whatever's actually relevant from the parent bug's description /
>  comments into the new one. 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1277621