Re: Danger: older bugs are getting squashed with NEEDINFO

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-09-13 at 12:27 -0400, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Guys,
>    Im sorry I missed the memo if there was one, I woke up this
> morning to a full page of bugmail, deleting valid bugs from the
> buglist and throwing them into a NEEDINFO state.
> 
> Javier pointed me to a blog post[0] which describes a new policy
> to mark bugs as NEEDINFO after one year. I'm raising the flag here
> on d-d-l because it concerns us all and I think every maintainer
> needs to know this policy is currently in effect.
[...]
[0]http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2009/08/10/gnome-bugsquad-policy-changes/

I didn't see this originally either and I'd like to concur in expressing
deep concern about both elements of the proposed policy.

For marking bugs NEEDINFO just because they are old: GNOME isn't the
same as Fedora or Ubuntu - there's no upstream there that's going to fix
our bugs if we don't fix them ourselves. If a bug existed, it probably
still exists.

There are exceptions to this - if an isolated undiagnosed backtrace with
no further information provided is still sitting there 3 years later,
it's unlikely to get useful fixed. But while such reports may make up a
sizable numerical fraction of open bugs, that's the bath-water. And the
baby - the old bugs that actually contain useful information - should
not be thrown out with it.

I will be extremely annoyed if all the old bug reports I filed against
Pango and GTK+ get NEEDINFO'ed - they represent hundreds of hours of
work in carefully documenting issues with the code. I'd have no recourse
other than to mass reopen them.

I think this has to be opt-*in* on a per-module basis

For the other component of the policy - identifying unchanging or
obsolete modules and WONTFIX'ing all their bugs... whether it hurts or
not is dependent on the module. Picking two random examples that I was
involved with:

 online-desktop: it's very unlikely the existing code base or user
   interface will ever be revived. WONTFIX'ing everything woudln't
   hurt (except for annoying the bug reporters with useless 
   email.)

 MemProf: I haven't worked on it for years, but I could definitely
   see someone picking it up again. If someone picked it up, they'd
   want all the bug reports just as they were left when worked stopped.

But in all cases, I don't see the point. If a module doesn't have an
active maintainer looking at bugs there is zero cost to having open bugs
for it.

- Owen