Bugzappers EOL process and abrt bug reporters being flagged with needinfo before bugs are closed?

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 16:50 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:08:35 -0500, James wrote:
> 
> > The alternative is silently
> > closing EOL'd bugs.  I don't think silently closing bugs works well with
> > the principle of least surprise.
> 
> The alternative is to communicate with the reporter much earlier.
> 1) When there is a stable update of the package the bug has been
> reported about. 

If we do that, reporters complain about being notified when an update
'obviously' doesn't fix their problem. This is not amenable to
automation, because updates can be *anything* from a security fix for a
single issue up to a major version bump of the software. We could set up
heuristics to determine how big a change an update is and do a mass
notification for updates which cross some sort of significance
threshold, but, let's face it, that's unlikely to happen.

> 2) When there is a new dist release, even if it doesn't
> contain a version upgrade of the software the bug has been reported
> about.

I'm not convinced there's many Fedora users who would both be completely
unaware of the release cycle and manage to dodge any reports of the new
release in any form of news media they keep up with.

>  3) When the package maintainer has not responded in any way
> after N months.

Why would notifying the reporter of this help at all? Bug the
maintainer? Sure (actually, I think Bugzilla does this by default; I get
a nag mail every day about my Mandriva bugs). Bug the maintainer's
supervisor, where they have one? Sure. But bug the reporter? Why?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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