Re: Danger: older bugs are getting squashed with NEEDINFO

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan van berkom gmail com>]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Danielle Madeley
<danielle madeley collabora co uk> 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?
>

Yes,
   I do receive bugmail almost every day on average myself, and if I have any
reason to close the bug, if its invalid or misguided, I will go all the way
to bugzilla.gnome.org and close or correct the bug, which generally represents
at least one bug a week I have to close.

I have been taking care of Glade for ~5 years now; does it represent alot
of time for me to mark one bug as confirmed every day for the next 5 years ?

Yes in fact it can take a big slice out of your own life.

Cheers,
               -Tristan

> 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.
>
> It seems that an UNCONFIRMED bug is likely to move into one of three
> states: NEW, DUPLICATE or NEEDINFO. Sometimes if the fix is easy, you
> might fix it immediately and move it to RESOLVED, but in this case the
> 1yr rule clearly does not apply.
>
> Marking bugs also seems to me to be a polite way of telling the reporter
> that you're aware of her issue and that it does seem to be a legitimate
> bug (especially in the case of GTK+ or another library, this means that
> maybe the reporter will stop trying to work out if it's a bug in her
> code).
>
> I know that sometimes you can't be sure about a bug immediately, so you
> leave it alone. Maybe we need a system that finds all UNCONFIRMED bugs
> that are 6 months old, or 11 months old and emails a reminder summary to
> the maintainer. That gives the maintainer an opportunity to confirm the
> bugs she now knows/suspects to be real.
>
> --danni
>
> --
> Danielle Madeley
>
> Collabora Ltd., Melbourne, Australia
> http://www.collabora.co.uk/
>
>