Michael Schwendt wrote:
On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:12:42 -0700, Andrew Farris wrote:
FYI, that was a bot running on behalf of the bug triage project and (as I and others understood it) was not supposed to be flooding bugs in rawhide but only in older releases... to weed out stale and forgotten bugs. Its a good thing, though partially seems to have gone awry at the moment.
With all due respect, this is a lame excuse IMO. To find out *why* some tickets are ignored would be interesting. Not just threaten to close them and effectively hide the issues under the carpet. The bot did exactly the wrong thing, because if the NEEDINFO is ignored, too, the bugs remain "stale and forgotten". You would not even learn if they are assigned to wrong people. That's a belated April Fool's joke.
But what could be gained from trying to solve bugs in software that is long modified to be unrecognizable from the state it was in then... the bugs were changed to NEEDINFO so that the reporters can then go back and indicate whether the bug is still relevant to anyone/them. Its important to know because its pointless for someone to look at it NOW that it was forgotten (however sad that is, and I agree its sad). A pragmatic point of view is necessary here; life and software development aren't always as we'd like them to be.
| Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported | against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no | longer maintained.
What do I care? When I filed the bug, the product was fresh and maintained, wasn't it? But more than a year later I'm no longer willing to spend time on the same issues without a single sign of life from the package owner.
You don't need to do anything if its not something that still matters, and you're not expected to. But why would you begrudge the developers a cleaner bugzilla if that doesn't matter anymore? If you don't care to spend time on it now do you really think anyone needs to?
| If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or | rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change | the status to ASSIGNED.
Why? So I'm kept busy or what? What is needed is a method to guarantee that the assignee handles the ticket actually.
That is precisely what the people involved with the bug triage effort are trying to do... but one cannot get to point B without traversing from point A, and bugs that are old, stale, forgotten, no longer needing to be maintained, etc, need to be closed or otherwise marked as such. Its regrettable that some bugs got left behind when they did, but a bug filed against 'rawhide' in 2006 is obviously obselete and you know this.
The past is now passed... bugs once forgotten should be forgotten (closed). And maybe in the future they won't get forgotten.