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

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

Basically, 'what Alex said.' I'm going to be sending a more general
email on this topic to desktop-devel and gnome-hackers today, as well.

Luis [and bugsquad, of course. :)

On Thu, 2003-02-06 at 08:57, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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.
> 
> -- 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>  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!