Cloning bugs: Just Don't Do It

[Rich Megginson]

On 11/03/2015 09:13 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> You see that 'Clone' button in Bugzilla? You, yes you, with your cursor
> hovering over it?
>
> Don't do it! It's a trap.
>
> Cloning a bug is almost never actually what you want to do. When you
> clone a bug, all of the following are transferred to the new bug:
>
> 1. CCs
> 2. Description and comments, as one big ugly block as the new bug's
> description
> 3. Pretty much all the metadata: whiteboard, keywords, tags,
> dependencies. This includes stuff like blocker metadata, which is
> almost never appropriate
> 4. External bug references
> 5. All sorts of other goddamn stuff
>
> In my experience, you almost *never* actually wanted all of that.
> Unless you really want a 2,000-line 'Description' which includes 50
> comments and is entirely unreadable, everyone CCed on the old bug CCed
> on the new bug, and all the metadata the same - just don't hit the
> Clone button. Create a new bug and copy/paste anything relevant into
> it.
>
> In particular, Red Hat people, for the love of all that's holy, please
> try not to clone Fedora bugs to RHEL unless it's really necessary! RHEL
> bugs generate a metric assload of bureaucratic change emails that
> Fedora contributors are almost never interested in. And no-one actually
> likes trying to read those huge, unreadable clone bug Descriptions:
> it's way, way nicer to create a new bug and cleanly summarize
> whatever's actually relevant from the parent bug's description /
> comments into the new one.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1277621
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