Re: Retiring bugs - or - guilty until provent innocent?

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Darryl Rees wrote:

> Dear Luis et al,
> 
> There are bugs (often build bugs, for eg.) that previously i was able to 
> duplicate, but subsequently have not been able to duplicate for several 
> months.

Build bugs that are old and have no comments for a while can certainly be 
closed if they work for you now. Unless its a really uncommon architecture 
the bug will be quickly filed again in the rare case its not actually fixed.
 
> Obviously 'works for me now :-)' is not a reasonable premise for 
> retiring a bug, but in many cases it feels like these were short-term 
> transient bugs and that there's little utility to retaining them as 
> unresolved bugs in bugzilla.
> 
> Is there anything that can be done to help clean out such bugs; if 
> nobody has commented on them for a few months, can somebody add 'haven't 
> seen this for a few months now' or something like that?

Some bugs are really bizzare and only show up on some architectures, 
compiler versions, library versions, or just in very uncommon situations. 
Fixing these bugs are really important, as they are the kind of bugs that 
make the system "feel unstable". It is important that bugs like that are 
not closed.

However, if the bug was easy to reproduce and now works for you I think 
its fine to just change the bug to "NEEDINFO" and ask the reporter if he 
still sees the bug in the newest version. If there is no reply in a few 
weeks its ok to just mark it FIXED.

Of course, there is always special cases. Use your judgement.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an uncontrollable amnesiac vampire hunter who knows the secret of the 
alien invasion. She's a time-travelling Buddhist magician's assistant who 
hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!