Auto-expiring bugs are getting absurd

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Schwendt" <mschwendt at gmail.com>
> To: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Thursday, February 6, 2014 2:21:53 PM
> Subject: Re: Auto-expiring bugs are getting absurd
> 
> On Wed, 05 Feb 2014 14:50:59 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 22:48 +0000, Colin Macdonald wrote:
> > > On 05/02/14 22:42, David Timothy Strauss wrote:
> > > > This is also not the first time this has happened to me.
> > > 
> > > I'll chime in: when I first switched to Fedora (F14/15 era), I found
> > > this quite obnoxious, enough that I remember it.
> > > 
> > > So there is also an issue of being a welcoming community to newcomers.
> > 
> > The problem is that no-one seems to come up with an alternative that's
> > any better. Leaving bugs on EOL versions open to rot away and be ignored
> > is no use. We *could* give everyone privs to re-open closed bugs, I
> > guess, and I personally don't think that would end terribly, but it's
> > kind of a radical plan.
> > 
> > The idea of not closing bugs that have comments after the EOL
> > notification doesn't necessarily make things better, I don't think; we'd
> > just have errors in the other direction. Say someone dropped a note 'oh
> > yeah, this is working now!' - it would be silly not to close the bug,
> > right?
> 
> Has that been tried before? It sounds like a better approach.
> 
> Where is the human to notice "comments after EOL" and act accordingly?
> How many tickets would be affected by a "comment after EOL"?
> 
> What is the underlying problem here anyway?
> Too many unhandled tickets -> EOL auto-close threatening -> too many
> closed tickets to handle -> how to escape from that loop?
> 
> In several large upstream bug trackers it is no different. Are developers
> always informed about what doesn't work even when not responding to
> tickets? Why should users still take the time to submit problem reports
> if they don't get a response?

Let me state the other side - out of maybe 20-30 requests for more information from reporters I get one or even none additional information in the bugs.
This is not motivating for developers to look at bug reports also. Why should packagers spend time trying to clarify what the problem is exactly if they don't get a response after the bug is open?
I'm even looking in the other direction if there is request for information from the assignee of the bug and there is none given the bug should be auto-closed (time period to be decided - 3 months sounds more feasible). This would be more helpful to people that fix bugs and triage their bugzillas too. Due to triaging many such bugs it makes it impossible for me to keep the pace and the very few good bugs (with enough information) are lost sometimes in the huge number of bugs so good reporters get upset. It's unfortunate that this happen but my personal experience is that >90% of reporters are unwilling to spend time helping reproducing the problem which makes the reports useless most of the time. 

Alexander Kurtakov

> 
> > algorithms are never perfect, but we do have to use them, as a
> > perennially under-resourced project.
> 
> I've posted about it in 2008 already, and I still think the auto-closing
> leads to hiding crap under the carpet.
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