Cloning bugs: Just Don't Do It

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 3 November 2015 at 16:13, Adam Williamson <adamwill at fedoraproject.org> 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.

Mostly agreed. The one legit use-case though is when someone wants to
to continue a package submission after a review has gone dead due to
the original submitter vanishing. There's often useful information you
want to carry through to the  final review, but it's not possible to
take ownership of the bug (afaik).