Re: 3.4 and bug reports

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Feb-2011, Rik wrote:

| Thomas Weber wrote:
| 
| > FWIW, my normal dealing in Debian is about the following:
| > 1) Try to answer bug reports somewhat fast. So that the reporter knows
| > the report isn't ignored. 
| > 
| > 2) If I can reproduce the bug, tag it as 'confirmed'. If not, tag it as
| > 'unreproducible' and 'moreinfo'. Ask the submitter to give more
| > information. 
| > 
| > 3) Bugs that are tagged as 'moreinfo' and don't get more information in
| > a reasonable amount of time (like 4 weeks) are closed. 
| > 
| > Point 3) is pretty strict, but about everyone in FOSS has more things on
| > the table than they have time. So hunting after bug reporters to get
| > more information is not economic. 
| > 
| > If I think that a bug is fixed in a newer version, I ask the bug
| > submitter to test that version. Ultimately, the idea is to push as much
| > work as possible to users -- they outnumber developers by a huge factor,
| > so it just makes sense to involve them as much as possible.
| 
| This is very sensible, and just what I had been doing on the Octave bug
| tracker when I had the time.  I just checked the savannah bug search form
| and it is easy to find bugs which have NOT been modified since a given
| date.  This makes criteria 3 easy to implement.

I agree that any old bugs which do not have requested feedback can be
closed.

| Also, my original proposal may have been slightly misinterpreted.  I was
| really trying to immediately get rid of a large class of bugs which were
| for snapshots or release candidate versions.  For example, "bug #32035:
| qr.cc test error on octave-dev source (3.3.54) on MInGW".  It's a single
| failing test on an unsupported snapshot which the bug reporter has
| acknowledged has been fixed.

I'd say close anything that has been fixed or is no longer a problem,
either because the reporter claimed it was fixed, or you can verify
that it is.  Otherwise, I don't have a problem with leaving the old
reports in place.  I don't like to see clutter in the bug database,
but I don't think we will ever see the number of bug reports (or bugs)
go to zero.

I don't agree with everything here:

  http://www.rants.org/2010/01/10/bugs-users-and-tech-debt/

but I find the ideas of "technical debt" and "having bug reports means
you have users" interesting.

jwe