Re: Closing bug reports
On Wed, 2020-01-01 at 20:58 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Wed, Jan 1, 2020 at 10:29 AM pmkellly(a)frontier.com
<pmkellly(a)frontier.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year Everyone!
>
> In my prior experience I was expected to keep any problem reports I
> filed (like bug reports) followed up on and make sure they got closed.
> For me it's a long established habit.
>
> I like to keep my bugzilla list short. Sometimes bugs that I have filed
> are fixed without without being closed. They just hang around until they
> age out of the system and someone closes them.
>
> Sometimes, bugs just age and age because I have updated them to be
> applicable to the current version of Fedora, but no one has had time to
> look at them. This isn't a criticism. I understand the some bugs are low
> priority for a number of good reasons.
>
> Today I sent some e'mails to the assignees of some bugs that I think
> should be closed because they are fixed, have been superseded by another
> bug, or in one case the application was retired.
>
> I re-read the pages in the wiki on bug reports and the topic of closing
> bugs seems missing except for "end of life"
>
> Question: Is this an okay thing to do? I asked this once before in the
> context of a particular bug and the recommendation was that I should
> send an e'mail to the assignee. I just want to determine if this is a
> good general case practice.
>
I'd use the bugzilla NEEDINFO feature to notify the
assignee/maintainer, rather than send direct emails. But based on
various emails on the subject of... too many emails, the problem with
NEEDINFO is it generates more emails. So I'd probably only use
NEEDINFO for bugs of some urgency rather than ordinary bugs or bugs
that are actually requests for enhancement, and also consider filing
the bug upstream. A difficulty with the current system is it's
non-obvious to what degree a component's Fedora maintainer is involved
with upstream development, versus mainly just packaging it for Fedora.
There are various practices. I tend to be pretty aggressive, honestly -
if I notice a bug that looks to me like it is clearly fixed but it's in
an open state, I usually just go ahead and close it with a comment.
Given that this is a trivially reversible operation I don't really see
it as a problem. But if you want to be less direct about it, using a
needinfo flag or emailing the maintainer both seem like perfectly fine
choices to me.
AFAIK there is no Official Policy on this, or anything, and much as I
love writing them it doesn't really seem like an appropriate topic for
one, it seems like more of an informal thing that may depend on the
people involved.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net