Re: random thought about bug-buddy (in the 'very long term thinking' category)

["John Fleck" <jfleck inkstain net>]

Sebastian Rittau <srittau jroger in-berlin de> said:

> On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 09:54:07PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> > So, this has a /bit/ to do with 1.4 support and such, but also just with
> > long-term planning. Would anyone object if future versions of bug-buddy
> > 'expired' a year after being built? Like, run the binary, it checks the
> > date, if date is greater than one year after being built, it refuses to
> > run.
> 
> I think that's a very bad idea. I know that it is embarassing to get
> reports about ancient versions, but that can't be helped by obsoleting
> bug-buddy. 

It's not that it's embarassing, it's that it's a huge waste of time.

The whole point of bug-buddy is to help us find and fix bugs. A bug report on
a GNOME 1.2 bug is generally useless (or even 1.0, we still get those), so
bug-buddy *is* obsolete at this point - the user just doesn't know it. So they
take the trouble to fill stuff out and file the report, and we have to take
the trouble to close it with a polite "please upgrade" and we've all wasted
our time. I don't know what the technical solution is here, but some sort of a
slow-burning fuse that would eventually notify the user of this obsoleteness
would be a great help.

Cheers,
John