Re: Danger: older bugs are getting squashed with NEEDINFO

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2009-09-19 at 10:42 +1000, Danielle Madeley wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 14:28 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > I think for most modules, confirming bugs has usually seemed like a
> > waste of of the maintainer's time. Confirming bugs assumes that the
> > maintainer isn't looking at bugs until they are confirmed. Once the
> > maintainer is already looking at a bug, what's the point of confirming
> > it? 
> 
> So, while it is indeed an extra click or two to confirm a bug as NEW, is
> it really that much extra time?
> 
> Surely most of your time was spent in reading the bug, thinking about
> it, establishing that it was not a duplicate, and then commenting on it
> that confirming it is only one extra mouse click.

I'm not really objecting to the work of confirming bugs, though I
sometimes feel a reluctance to confirm a bug where the reporter has a
valid problem, but is proposing a solution to it which is utterly on
crack, and I would worry that I'd forget to confirm some bug, and then a
year later it would go poof.

But the main problem is that treating UNCONFIRMED bugs as invalid bugs
is imposing an interpretation that is utterly unsupported for 10's of
thousands of old bugs. The incentive to confirm bugs in the past was
just not there at all.

- Owen