Re: Bugzilla spring cleaning

[Elijah Newren <newren math utah edu>]

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 11:48 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 10:39, Luis Villa wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Do you encourage filing of duplicate bugs? If a bug is listed as open in
> bugzilla I would normally not refile the same bug. As far as I am
> concerned filing duplicate bugs is a waste of time of both the reporter
> and the maintainers.

Yes, this is an area of difficulty.  However, if you observe a bug in a
newer version than what a bug was reported against, you /should/ add a
comment to that effect to the bug.  If you can spot any other
information that is missing then please add it.

It'd be cool if we had the ability to encourage people to report
duplicates all they wanted.  Of course, doing so would mean requiring
some more automation (perhaps on the part of the dup-finder; luis has
talked about this), and also shielding maintainers from seeing bugs
until either an automated process or someone on the bugsquad had first
done some kind of check for duplicates.  An alternate strategy which is
actually making this possible is the cooperative bug isolation project
(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~liblit/sampler/).  Check it out, it's
really cool and it has found and fixed some "random crashes" already.


Hope this helps,
Elijah