Fwd: closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 15:11:51 -0500
jonstanley at gmail.com ("Jon Stanley") wrote:

> As part of a re-launch of the bug triage project [1,2], I believe that
> it would be beneficial to mass close the bugs that are for releases
> that are no longer maintained.  Please find my proposal for this
> below.  Sorry for cross-posting, but it's relevant across multiple
> communities within Fedora.

Do we really want to just close all those bugs? 

> I will be at FUDCon in order to discuss the very topic of the
> re-launch of the triage project.

Excellent. I think we need to address this issue... 

> [1]
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-January/msg00009.html
> [2]
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-January/msg00000.html
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jon Stanley <jonstanley at gmail.com>
> Date: Jan 4, 2008 1:45 PM
> Subject: closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases
> To: fedora-advisory-board at redhat.com
> 
> 
> I can put some time this weekend into closing out old bugs, however,

Note that you might want to wait until after fudcon and until you have
gotten input from everyone before doing anything hasty... 

> before doing so, I wanted to make sure that our messaging is crystal
> clear.  What I had been doing for kernel bugs is placing them in
> NEEDINFO_REPORTER and asking if the problem still existed, etc after
> manually reviewing the bugs (some I changed to a current release
> because it was mentioned in comments, but not in the version
> metadata).  However, this won't scale - there's no way that I or
> anybody else can reasonably review 3600 bugs for ones that are
> incorrectly tagged.  

Sure, agreed 100%, but closing them makes less work for us, but makes
anyone who filed them in the past where they were ignored pretty mad. 

See: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

How about instead we move them all up to a current release... 
Then, the maintainer should ping them or deal with them in some way. 

I'm concerned that these sort of mass closings or "clear the deck" just
ends up annoying bug submitters, and doesn't really help us in the long
term since it just happens again a few releases down the road... 
so all kinds of bugs get filed, ignored, then closed, even when they
still do affect current releases. 

> This leaves us with ~9000 bugs (F7, F8, and
> rawhide) to deal with (still a monumental task).  I propose doing
> something similar with rawhide bugs that haven't been touched in ~6
> months, not sure of the number of those, haven't looked yet.  Here's
> the proposed comment to WONTFIX these.  I want to get the most input
> possible before doing this:

Yeah, but how many of the now closed fc6 or rawhide bugs are really
still bugs? we have no idea... we should deal with the whole IMHO. 

> <begin>
> Hello,
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to report this bug.  Unfortunately, this
> version of Fedora has reach end-of-life and is no longer maintained.
> Please refer to  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle for an
> explanation of the Fedora lifecycle policy.
> 
> We therefore regret the necessity of closing this bug report WONTFIX.
> Please upgrade to a currently maintained release of Fedora, currently
> either Fedora 7 or Fedora 8, and attempt to reproduce this bug.  If
> the bug still exists, feel free to re-open this bug report, changing
> the version accordingly, or file a new bug report (you can use the
> 'Clone as Bug' link at the top of this bug report in order to preserve
> the content of this bug in the new one).
> 
> We regret any inconvenience that this may cause you, and thank you for
> your continued support of Fedora!
> <end>
> 
> I propose starting with FC6, since that recently reached EOL and
> people would be understanding about it (hopefully).
> Comments/thoughts/suggestions/flames welcome.

I agree we need to do something, but I don't think mass closing is the
answer. We need to get things to where maintainers do something with
their bugs, or in the cases of packages where maintainers can't
possibly handle things (kernel, rpm, glibc, whatever) we need to have
people helping those maintainers. 

I also don't think 'bug days' really help much, except as a way to
possibly teach people to triage bugs. The mass of bugs is just too
daunting and any single day is kind of a drop in the bucket. 

Perhaps one thing we could do is generate a report with packages with
the most bugs, to point out where we could focus our efforts? 
Or we could look at oldest bugs and try and bring those up to date.

Just some thoughts... 

kevin
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