Re: Diet of bugs: the 30-30-30 plan

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> John Ericson <john john pp se> writes:
> > On Sep 11 00:31, Dan Siemon wrote:
> > > 
> > > What should we do about bug reports that are just a crash trace from an
> > > older version? Ie bug #31988?
> > >         Dan
> > > 
> > 
> > Could it be changed to status NEEDINFO, since its an old version of
> > gnome-applets, to say that we dont know if the problem exists in newer
> > versions of gnome-applets?
> 
> I wouldn't do that just because it's an old version; NEEDINFO means
> you need more info that only the bug reporter can provide. Someone
> else could easily check whether it still happens, assuming you have
> good instructions to reproduce.
> 
> However, 31988 has no instructions to reproduce, and the backtrace is
> meaningless ?? ?? ?? stuff, so I'd close NEEDINFO due to lack of
> instructions to reproduce or other clues on what the bug is.

To amplify NEEDINFO is not a resolution -- it's just a temporary
holding state. Every bug that is marked NEEDINFO will need to 
be looked at again. (Though we may want to periodically query for NEEDINFO
bugs more than 6 months old and close them as INCOMPLETE en masse.)

The corresponding resolved state is INCOMPLETE ... which means, we
don't have enough information and we have no hope of getting enough
information.

I'd say, for bugs against older versions of GNOME:

 - check quickly to see if it is a commonly reported bug (*) or
   one you recognize, if so resolve as a duplicate

 - If the bug has no significant instructions for reproduction (or
   instructions like "run the control center") and the backtrace
   doesn't look useful, close as INCOMPLETE.

 - Try to reproduce the bug yourself with current GNOME, if
   that succeeds, confirm the bug.

 - If not mark as NEEDINFO, including a comment along the
   lines of.
     
    Can you still check if this happens with the current version
    of GNOME?

    If not, please close the bug. Otherwise, please add a comment 
    and reopen the bug

Regards,
                                        Owen

(*) I think it would be good to have a keyword in bugzilla like
    COMMONDUP so that we could query for those bugs in a particular
    module and keep a browser window open when working on the 
    remainder.