Marking zapped bugs

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 16:43 -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 12:29 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 14:01 -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> > 
> > > What you're really saying is that most maintainers want to work from a
> > > list of unexpired bugs.  But there are ways to achieve that other than
> > > marking all the expired bugs WONTFIX.  Maintainers can always filter on
> > > the currently maintained Fedora versions, but it becomes tedious to
> > > configure that, which is where a virtual EXPIRED resolution exposed by
> > > Bugzilla would come in handy.
> > 
> > Mostly your proposal makes sense,
> 
> Thanks for the response.
> 
> > but we're trying very hard to stick to
> > upstream Bugzilla since 3.x, as heavy customization of 2.x caused more
> > problems than it solved. So we're reluctant to add resolutions and
> > statuses that don't exist upstream - even if Mozilla have hacked up
> > their own copy of their own upstream bug reporting system to add
> > resolutions...
> 
> I don't buy that: Red Hat Bugzilla currently has 4 upstream resolutions
> to 7 custom ones.  Are all the custom resolutions actively being phased
> out?  Otherwise, can you give some examples to illustrate the marginal
> harm likely to occur if an 8th custom resolution is added?

Hum, I didn't realize our resolutions were so customized, I thought they
were the upstream ones; this is what I've been told when discussing
custom resolutions in the past. It's certainly something you could
propose as an enhancement by filing a bug against Bugzilla, then.

> 2b. Co-opt an existing little-used custom resolution, e.g., CANTFIX
> (semantically questionable on its face, but maybe reasonable in light of
> the explanation on
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html#status ).

As noted at the top of that page, that is the policy for RHEL, not for
Fedora. Fedora policy is
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow#CLOSED . It
states only "The resolutions CANTFIX, WONTFIX, and WORKSFORME are for
use by maintainers only, and are self-explanatory."

> 3. Do not change the bug state, and have maintainers apply the same
> conditions now used by the bug zapper on all of their searches.
> Reducing mutable state is generally good in that it reduces the possible
> ways for things to get out of whack.  But then it takes more work to see
> whether a non-CLOSED bug is expired.
>   3a. Like #3, but make it easier with a virtual EXPIRED resolution.
> Probably an undesirable level of customization to Bugzilla.
> 4. Add an "Expired" keyword or custom field, use it, and:
>   4a. Continue to close the bugs WONTFIX.  Ugh, but I can use the
> keyword/field in search and maybe even get it to show as a column on
> search results.
>   4b. Do not change the status, and have maintainers use the
> keyword/field in their search.

I think if we're going to change this, the only sensible change is to
use a different CLOSED resolution. All the others seem like hacks which
are likely to cause more trouble/confusion than they resolve. We clearly
want to bugs to be CLOSED, not open with a quasi-closed keyword or
whiteboard field.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net