bugzilla triage madness :-/

[Andrew Farris]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:12:42 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
> 
>> FYI, that was a bot running on behalf of the bug triage project and (as I and 
>> others understood it) was not supposed to be flooding bugs in rawhide but only 
>> in older releases... to weed out stale and forgotten bugs.  Its a good thing, 
>> though partially seems to have gone awry at the moment.
> 
> With all due respect, this is a lame excuse IMO. To find out *why* some
> tickets are ignored would be interesting. Not just threaten to close them
> and effectively hide the issues under the carpet. The bot did exactly the
> wrong thing, because if the NEEDINFO is ignored, too, the bugs remain
> "stale and forgotten". You would not even learn if they are assigned to
> wrong people. That's a belated April Fool's joke.

But what could be gained from trying to solve bugs in software that is long 
modified to be unrecognizable from the state it was in then... the bugs were 
changed to NEEDINFO so that the reporters can then go back and indicate whether 
the bug is still relevant to anyone/them.  Its important to know because its 
pointless for someone to look at it NOW that it was forgotten (however sad that 
is, and I agree its sad).  A pragmatic point of view is necessary here; life and 
software development aren't always as we'd like them to be.

> | Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported
> | against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no
> | longer maintained.
> 
> What do I care? When I filed the bug, the product was fresh and maintained,
> wasn't it? But more than a year later I'm no longer willing to spend time
> on the same issues without a single sign of life from the package owner.

You don't need to do anything if its not something that still matters, and 
you're not expected to.  But why would you begrudge the developers a cleaner 
bugzilla if that doesn't matter anymore?  If you don't care to spend time on it 
now do you really think anyone needs to?

> | If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or
> | rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change
> | the status to ASSIGNED.
> 
> Why? So I'm kept busy or what? What is needed is a method to guarantee
> that the assignee handles the ticket actually.

That is precisely what the people involved with the bug triage effort are trying 
to do... but one cannot get to point B without traversing from point A, and bugs 
that are old, stale, forgotten, no longer needing to be maintained, etc, need to 
be closed or otherwise marked as such.  Its regrettable that some bugs got left 
behind when they did, but a bug filed against 'rawhide' in 2006 is obviously 
obselete and you know this.

The past is now passed... bugs once forgotten should be forgotten (closed).  And 
maybe in the future they won't get forgotten.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0x8300BF29 fingerprint 071D FFE0 4CBC 13FC 7DEB  5BD5 5F89 8E1B 8300 BF29
  revoked key 0xC99B1DF3 no longer used
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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