Fwd: closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

Michael Schwendt mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam at arcor.de
Sun Jan 6 03:49:03 UTC 2008


On Sat, 5 Jan 2008 16:25:53 -0500, Jon Stanley wrote:

> > t is even more rude to close such old bugs as WONTFIX or
> > INSUFFICIENT_DATA. When only after the EOL of a distribution version there
> > is activity within a ticket, that is like saying "we didn't care about
> > your bug report this time, and we don't promise either that we look into
> > the issue this time".
> 
> Is there some other reasonable course of action?

Rephrase the canned response that is cut'n'pasted into the ticket.

It is not very helpful IMO to point out that a dist version has reached
EOL if the bug was reported while the dist was an active release.

Instead, explain to the reporter *why* the ticket has not been dealt with
for such a long time. This is where triagers must be very careful. The
reporter might believe that the provided details are sufficient and that
the problem is reproducible. It is extremely poor form to not even try
whether the problem is reproducible. And *if* you ask for NEEDINFO, do
tell what is missing. Another reporter may flood a bugzilla ticket with
many pages of [often irrelevant] data, which increases the time it takes
to wade through it. Point to a good web page that explains how to get
backtraces and how to increase the quality of bug reports in general.

> [...] basically admit the fact that we know that
> we have a problem, and that we are taking action to fix the problem in
> the future so that we don't get into this state again.

If you tell reporters that there are too many bug reports and not enough
people to handle them all, do it early and possibly with an automated
comment, for example after a maintainer has not responded after one month.
Just don't touch old tickets after several months of inactivity only
because there is hope that they can be closed after two weeks of waiting
in NEEDINFO. So, while F9 is being developed, a backlog of F6 tickets
causes a headache? With Fedora's fast-paced development, better focus
on tickets about F8 and rawhide.

> > The NEEDINFO
> > state should be used when there is committment to moving forward with a
> > ticket, not just to give the reporter something to do after a long of no
> > interest in the report.
> 
> Are you saying that triagers should not use NEEDINFO for current bugs?
>  At that point, there's not developer commitment, there is triager
> commitment.

*What* type of activity can you guarantee after the reporter (or
somebody else) has cleared the NEEDINFO state?




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