proposal for changes to auto-expiring bugs

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 11:06:07AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> So, all those bugs stay open on the EOL version until EOL+1?
> 
> That seems poor to me. What do we do if someone clears needinfo and
> says: Yes, this still affects me, I am running EOL release. Please fix
> it.
> 
> We cannot, the EOL release is closed, no more updates or support. 
> 
> How does leaving it open there help?

It doesn't, but I think the trouble of closing those by hand is overall less
than the problem of closing too many bugs


> >     EOL wouldn't be visibile as an available status for bugzilla
> > users to select when closing a bug in the interface, so it does not
> > add to UI clutter, but also makes it easy for us to do reports
> > distinguishing between intentional and eol closure.
> Is this possible?

I believe so -- you only make the transition available to the Fedora EOL
user account. But because it's bugzilla, this kind of thing may involve
writing some Perl, and I'm sympathetic to the bugzilla maintenance team not
wanting to deal with that. (That's the main reason for suggesting the second
option, of setting a keyword instead.)


> >     This does risk some false positives (negatives? whatever) where
> > NEEDINFO is cleared with "works for me" but the bug not closed, but
> > that seems like a less serious problem.
> Yeah, thats another issue with this... they would stick around in that
> case until the maintainer or someone came in and cleared them. 

Yes, but see the other message. At the very least, I bet it will be dozens
or at worst hundreds, which is a managable amount for people interested in
helping with EOL triage. On the other side, we have many thousands of
auto-closed bugs right now. And I think that triage work would really only
be needed if we end up feeling that we've tilted the balance too far in the
direction of making the package maintainers clean up.

> > 3.  As #1, but just leave bugs in NEEDINFO state forever.
> >     This would possibly require maintainers to update their searches /
> >     filters to leave out NEEDINFO bugs, or at least NEEDINFO bugs
> > from older releases.
> It would also be misleading, IMHO. 
> "Hey reporter, I need info to fix this" 

In this case, the message would be something like "We're sorry we weren't
able to resolve this bug within the lifespan of Fedora ##. We do appreciate
the report, and we may be able to fix it in the next release. Could you
please confirm that this is still an issue in the latest release of Fedora?
Thank you."

With this message, if needinfo is cleared, and then the bug isn't touched
for a long time, it would probably be a good candidate for human triage.

-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>