Marking zapped bugs

[Alexander Kurtakov]

> On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:10:17 -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 09:38 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> The practical point is that F12
> >> is about to go EOL which means the bug must be closed...
> > 
> > Why?  Obviously it needs to be clear that nothing further should be
> > expected from the maintainer unless/until the version is bumped.  But
> > the project can choose to indicate that by closing the bugs as WONTFIX
> > or some other way, e.g., another resolution or by customizing Bugzilla
> > to show a notice on bugs that are open against an EOL version of Fedora.
> > Personally, I dislike the use of WONTFIX because philosophically I think
> > it doesn't fit, and practically it makes zapped bugs impossible to
> > distinguish from real WONTFIX bugs in searches
> > (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528319).
> 
> This is my problem with the auto closing also.  Leaving a bug open allows
> a more dedicated maintainer to come along (even years later) and actually
> fix or even apply patches that are still relevant without wasting time
> with bugs that we're actually looked at and legitimately closed.

Years later pretty much every bug will be irrelevant thanks to the underlying 
changes that happen with every release and asking submitters to verify that 
the bug is still there is the right way to go. After all 8 out of 10 abrt 
submitted bugs against Eclipse stays months with questions and needinfo flags 
and no response from submitters.
Note that I'm not saying these bugs shouldn't be submitted sometimes even just 
because for the 2 submitters that answer questions but I definitely don't want 
to waste my time closing the rest of them.
"Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. "
This is the best we can do no matter what we want to do!

P.S. Believe me having open bugs that both the packager and the submitter care 
for are useless and these are the kind of bugs that get auto closed. If one of 
them cares he will change the version flag. Oh and looking at a list of 
hundreds bugs makes things close to impossible to put priorities, fix and 
improve the situation.

Alexander Kurtakov