Re: obscure bugs

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 08:22:40AM -0600 or thereabouts, John Fleck wrote:
> In trying to work through old bugs and get them categorized, I'm
> running into many that fit a common pattern, and I'm wondering what to
> do with them.
> 
> They're typically old - GNOME 1.2 or before - and consist of a
> description to the effect of "I don't know", or "it crashed," followed
> by a backtrace - no description of what crashed or what was happening
> prior to the crash.
> 
> Is it reasonable to just mark these "INCOMPLETE" and be done with
> them, or is there some value in saving them and putting them
> somewhere, and if so, where?

I have wondered about this. I started off by making great duplicate
chains of them. But then I realised that every time you do that, 
all the people who own other bugs in the same duplicate chain get
email too. So you can easily end up with thirty mails when you add
one to a long chain; and the person who sent in the one they all
got added to gets thirty emails, one for each addition. 

So I wasn't sure. I personally would cope with that. I like to see
what's happening with my bug. But some people would probably get
peeved.

So now I use a couple of standard close message. I got the original
for gleblanc, but I turned that into this, because I run with 
--verbose myself :) 

  This is a stock close message, I'm afraid. It looks like this is
  a report from an early bug-buddy which doesn't include a summary,
  a body, or details of what crashed, let alone how to reproduce it.
  There's tons of these, and they're generally impossible to debug
  since there is no information. So I'm closing it as incomplete. 
  Sorry about that. 

  Feel free to file future bugs at http://bugzilla.gnome.org but
  _please_ include details of what crashed and what you did. These are
  really important. 

  Thanks!

Or the same without the bug-buddy references. And I mark it as incomplete.
I do worry that I'll do that with the one message that has the
critically-useful stacktrace, but there are several patterns, as you
say. I see two a lot: the really old bug-buddy one with less than a
dozen old lines all of "?? in ()". And another which is colossally
long, all the functions are gtk_-something, and it appears to cycle
through them and then stop. Those, I close as INCOMPLETE without
compunction. 

Telsa