Re: 4K Bugs

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Andreas Röhler <address@hidden> writes:

> What about getting bugs deleted when not dealt with after some time - 
> while informing the author?

That is what many projects do -- when they make a new release, they
close all bug reports pertaining to older releases.  I see the
attraction, especially when there's a shortage of people to handle bug
reports, but it seems rather wasteful.

Bug reports have value.  Some more than others, of course.  :-)  If they
present a reproducible bug, then it seems odd to close the report.  If,
on the other hand, they are not reproducible, or they require more data
from the user for us to proceed with debugging (and that data doesn't
arrive within a certain period (for the Emacs bug tracker, that period
is "some years", apparently), then they should be closed, because we
can't proceed in any meaningful sense.

That's why I'm going through the bug reports marked "moreinfo" and
closing the ones that seem hopeless, and prodding the ones that seem
perhaps to be possible to proceed with.

But having a morass of bug reports, like we do now, is (I think)
discouraging to everybody.  No matter what you do, it doesn't seem to
matter, because there's just so many reports.

So unless more people step up, roll up their sleeves and do some bug
triage from time to time, I wouldn't be upset if we just closed all bugs
reports that were older than last release.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no