Why should I ever bother filing another bug?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:33 PM, Felix Miata <mrmazda at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Actually there is. When someone files a good bug, as opposed to one that
> requires more than trivial attention due to significant missing or invalid
> information, achieving fixed status is an informal statement that the filer's
> effort was valuable. It getting duped to a newer bug that isn't materially
> different in quality is an informal statement that the filer's effort was not
> appreciated, thus the subject.

I humbly disagree with this point of view and I'm pretty sure we have
never documented this interpretation or expectation in anything set
forth in the project level guidance around bug ticket activity.  I
don't know of a way to convince to change your person opinion on this,
but its critical you realize that its most likely not a widely held
one and thus you will continually find yourself in conflict with other
people's workflows.

>
>> So, once more for the cheap seats: *why* do you think closing an older
>> bug as a dupe of a newer one is a respect issue? What's the big problem
>> with it?
>
> When I get a list of all bugs I filed, there's nothing AFAICT that can tell
> me whether a dupe to a newer is really a fixed - there's no way to get into a
> buglist the status of a bug duped to. Thus the report misleads about the
> quality of effort put forth, a significant part of which is ensuring against
> filing a duplicate by competent searching prior to filing.

This buglist reporting workflow deficiency is an argument against
setting dupes at all for any bug ever  and is not specific to the
issue of how to competently choose how to set a duplicate tag among
multiple bugs.  Are you really trying to do a comprehensive assessment
of _quality_
of bugzilla activity? I'd like to see a fully written up methodology
around that. We may get a better idea of what your ultimately trying
to achieve if you see your concerns about quality of effort inside the
context of the larger assessment goals you are interested in.

>
> When anyone is attempting to assess the overall efficiency of Bugzilla, one
> aspect is the open time. Duping to newer misleads about this too.

Is anyone actually attempting to do that at this point in time?


-jef