Maintainer Responsibilities

[Kevin Kofler]

Steve Grubb wrote:
> When bugs are closed, they disappear from the reporter's bz frontpage.

That's a Bugzilla misfeature (not to say "bug"). Bugzilla should default to
showing closed bugs. Not just for this case, but also to avoid duplicate
reports for:
* NOTABUG reports (which keep getting duplicates because people don't notice
the bugs closed as NOTABUG),
* issues which are fixed in supported releases, but not in the EOL release
the user is still using,
* issues which are fixed in Rawhide, but cannot be fixed in existing
releases for technical reasons
etc.

> Its far easier to leave the bug open and close it when the fixed package
> gets pushed through bodi.

That assumes we know when the bug got fixed in the first place, which isn't
always the case (see my reply to Till Maas).

> Yes. Many times when I am evaluating a package I look in bz to see what
> bugs are open against it as a test sniff of what its quality might be
> like. If the maintainer is closing everything as upstream bugs, I might be
> installing a steaming hot pile of awful and not knowing its got lots of
> problems.

Then you need to fix your search to include closed bugs.

> Also by closing unresolved bugs you are inviting duplicate bug reports.

Because Bugzilla is broken. See above. Let's fix Bugzilla.

        Kevin Kofler