[QA] To clone or not to clone ( a bug report ) that's the question...

[Kevin Kofler]

Jesse Keating wrote:
>   1) the same "bug" may be caused by different things in different
> releases.  Not every package has the same code for the entire release
> family.

That's pretty rare. Even where the version differs, the bug can still be the
same. Even for Amarok 1 and 2, which are very different, there are bugs in
common with almost the same code involved (like the recently-fixed security
issue).

>   2) different sets of users care about bugs in different release trees.
> Closing a bug as fixed->rawhide doesn't help the user who is hitting
> this issue on say F-9.

Solution: make it a policy that bugs should never be closed Rawhide unless
they only affected Rawhide. It should also be required to push bugfixes out
to at least updates-testing as soon as the bug gets fixed in Rawhide,
unless there is a really good reason not to (e.g. the fix needs a rewrite
of the whole application).

>   3) bodhi auto-closing.  Not every update gets pushed at the same time,

Then that's the issue to solve.

> and closing a single bug when an F-10 update goes out doesn't help the
> F-9 users know that the update for their release has gone out, or been
> delayed, or just not provided.

But having the bug cloned does not solve this, requiring bugfixes to be
pushed to all supported releases at the same time (unless there's a strong
reason not to) does.

>   4) The maintainer is the right person to decide if the bugs should be
> collapsed into one, rather than the triager trying to make a judgement
> call.  It's easier to close->dup than to clone in the first place, if
> all the above doesn't apply.

I really don't want to have to close clones as duplicates all the time, and
triagers might even end up creating new clones if they notice there's only
one.

        Kevin Kofler