Re: unarchiving

[Michael Albinus]

Felix Lechner via "General discussion for the tracker at
debbugs.gnu.org" <help-debbugs@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Bob & Karl,

Hi,

> On Sun, Feb 16 2025, Bob Proulx wrote:
>
>> Archiving of bugs is mostly an anti-spam control.
>
> That's also the answer I offered in December of 2023.

Archiving has also another effect. You can filter actions for
unarchived or archived bugs. This makes a serious performance
difference, for example when searching.

>> Perhaps this means that archiving could actually be globally disabled?
>
> I don't like archived bugs either and know how to disable them (plus, I
> have the Perl skills to fix any problems) if there is a consensus.

In /etc/debbugs we have

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
$gRemoveAge = 28;   # days after closed bugs are cleaned out
$gSaveOldBugs = 1;  # whether to archive such bugs
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

This is a global value; I'm not aware of package specific settings. And
it would be complicate: bugs are reassigned from one package to another,
with unexpected effects: a closed bug could be archived in the other
package, although not intended.

And what to do with bugs, which are assigned to several packages? Which
package controls the time period to be used, if the packages have
different values?

Honestly, I'm not in favor to change this behavior on the server.

Karl, if you use Emacs, there is the library 'debbugs' for handling bugs
on debbugs.gnu.org. I'm the author of. I could extend this package in
order to unarchive archived bugs prior an action, automatically and if
needed. This should be configurable. WDYT?

> Kind regards
> Felix

Best regards, Michael.