closing older bug reports without looking = bad practice ?

[Marius Andreiana]

Hi all,

I've got a bunch of notices with FC5 test1 and test2 bugs being closed
as there have been a lot of updates meanwhile. For me, as a tester which
monitors some of the bugs and find some time once in a weekend to do
some triage, this seemed plain rude. 

If there are too many bugs overwhelming developers then the cause should
be addressed (better code with fewer bugs, which means more resources
devoted to coding which are unavailable now) or find alternative
solutions, where fedora testers could help. Closing all the reported
bugs won't make them go away, but will make testers go away. With the
current bugzilla setup, the number of reported bugs would have decreased
as more testers do triage and see if they are still valid in rawhide, or
they could confirm it until a developer finally looks at it, or the
reporter might update it with new info.
A practice from openoffice bugzilla could be borrowed - bugs reported by
usual bugzilla acounts are by default UNCONFIRMED, and only fedora
testers can set them to NEW. If there are too many bugs, a developer
could ignore UNCONFIRMED ones.

I also noticed Dave closes kernel bugs with each kernel release, asking
people to retest. While this might save developers time, it could also
leave real bugs closed as reporter might get tired of re-confirming a
bug for 3 times.
Take for example this bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=174968
In FC5test1, looks like the bttv driver had some problems, causing
tvtuners to stop working. A few updates later, it worked again. The
causes for not working and working again are unknown, therefore it could
happen on every new release. Just cross fingers and hope for the best!

To conclude, please don't close bug reports without researching them
first. If Red Hat staff doesn't have time for it, please ask for triage
help on fedora-test list, even with weekly themes, such as GNOME triage
week (including searching for upstream bugs), kernel week etc - just
post the link to the bugzilla query for all the required components.

Thanks and looking forward for a better FC5 release!
-- 
Marius Andreiana