Re: Handling bugs in obsolete code

[Andrew Hyatt]

John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Andrew Hyatt <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 10:46 PM Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> From: Andrew Hyatt <address@hidden>
>>> 
>>> Has anyone considered putting these obsolete packages in the gnu ELPA? I'm
>>> not sure about the bug policy, but I'd guess that bugs shouldn't be filed
>>> against ELPA packages.
>
>>     AFAIK bugs are files against ELPA packages like they are against the
>>     core Emacs. So moving to ELPA will not change this aspect of obsolete
>>     packages.
>
>>     (It also feels wrong to move them to ELPA just because they are
>>     obsolete. ELPA is supposed to be home for new and advanced stuff, not
>>     for obsolete stuff. If someone steps forward wanting to maintain an
>>     obsolete package, then a move to ELPA might make good sense, though.)
>
>> That's a fair point. Maybe there could be some special ELPA repository for
>> obsolete packages. But what I'm mostly trying to figure out is if there is
>> *any* way to get code to be completely unmaintained. We are, after all,
>> trying to reduce the number of bugs (see the thread on 4k bugs) overall, and
>> this is one way to do that. So the only way people would agree on right now,
>> is if we remove the code entirely from emacs distribution. But I suspect
>> that such a change would be rejected, even from obsolete packages, because
>> someone might still be depending on them.
>
> What if we just use an "obsolete" tag, so the bugs could be filtered out from
> our running total, but they still remain open?

That would help, although it would still mean that new bugs would have
to be triaged and tagged as obsolete, as opposed to not existing at all.
If we did such a thing, it'd be nice if debbugs filtered obsolete tags
by default.

Another variant on that is to say that all bugs against obsolete packages
have "minor" severity, which would accomplish the same thing without
needing a new tag.  On the hopefully rare occasions in which the bug
really is severe (crashes emacs, corrupts data, etc) it can be have a
non-minor severity.