Re: Bugzilla spring cleaning

[Elijah Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 12:39 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 10:36 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 16:25 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Also, we have been talking to luis about creating some sort of SQL query
> > > > to mass-close nautilus bugs for old versions that have not been touched
> > > > in a while.
> > 
> > Perhaps checking that those bugs are in fact not in the newest version
> > would be a good idea, considering that my copy of nautilus tends to
> > crash several times a day.
> 
> Realistically the whole point is that there are so many open bugs right
> now that checking them all is not possible with current manpower. We'd
> explicitly /not/ close any bugs with recent duplicates, so if you're
> filing those crashes you're seeing and they are getting marked dup or
> are otherwise still relevant, they would not be lost.

What is also implied here, though Luis didn't state it explicitly, is
that we're more than willing to reopen bugs if someone duplicates them
again with the current release.

Also, here's my viewpoint about the situation and why we want to do
this: 

With a large number of bugs, it becomes necessary to prioritize.  Which
bugs should the developers concentrate on--bugs which we know affect the
recent release, or bugs which only have a possibility of affecting users
of the most recent release?

>From my experience, bugs that tend to remain open across many releases
without much activity tend to be vague or lack duplication instructions.
If there is a particular bug that is bothering you, it is quite easy to
bump up its priority by providing more detail.  For example, bug 136587
had bothered me for nearly 6 months (though I avoided reporting it
because I couldn't give anything other than a vauge description).  It
apparently had been reported many times in Red Hat's bugzilla as well
(though I didn't learn about that until after it was fixed in Gnome
bugzilla).  Anyway, once someone posted the details of how to duplicate
the problem, it was fixed just over a week later.

Hope this helps,
Elijah