Re: List of Issues with 'patch_abandoned' assigned to them - as of September 2015

[James Lowe]

On 20/09/15 22:52, Simon Albrecht wrote:
> On 20.09.2015 23:10, James Lowe wrote:
>>
>> My thinking is like this; I pick an issue to work on, I do some stuff,
>> make a patch, have a discussion, then get bored and go silent.
>>
>> The issue is now patch_abandoned.
>>
>> What is the benefit of leaving this label (or even having it in the
>> first place)
> 
> One can see immediately that a patch has already been prepared for this
> issue, which may serve as a starting point for future work. True,
> anybody to pick up such an issue would have to read through the entire
> discussion anyway, but I’d rather ask the other way round:
> What’s the benefit of deleting the Patch label, or the harm that a
> Patch:abandoned does?

Extra cruft that serves no purpose as I can see.

We have waiting/needs_work already.


>>   as anyone new who wanted to look for an issue would have to
>> start from square 1 anyway or pick up where someone left off (i.e. start
>> from square 2 so to speak), so how is this different from 'Accepted'
>> with no patch label as long as 'someone' (i.e. the Patch Meister)
>> updated the issue tracker with some words?
>>
>> In other words what is the difference between an issue that has had a
>> patch abandoned for 2 years to an issue that has never been started but
>> has been accepted?
> 
> Status is independent of Patch status.

Yes that is true and that works well.

The 'new' status was for those issues that had been added by random Joes
(not members of the bug squad) and then it was changed to 'Accepted'
once the issue was checked - else it would be marked invalid or
duplicate (or even merged). If we're going to keep 'blank' then we could
even do way with the 'new' status.

> True, I did myself make some thoughts on merging those two fields: i.e.
> replacing Status:Started by Status:Patch_new etc. After all,
> Status:Fixed would be a fitful successor to Status:Patch_push.

Actually 'Fixed' could be also potentially removed as well and the label
Fixed_X_x_x be used in it's place.

So issues have a status of blank/Accepted/Started/Verified
Patch labels of blank/new/review/countdown/needs_work/waiting
Other Labels - included the documentation/ugly/enhancement etc. but with
the custom label of Fixed_X_x_x as part of that.

> Status:Patch_abandoned would mark an issue as ‘suspended’.

Suspended for whom? Either an issue is being worked on or it isn't
(let's forget those in the patch review process, invalids and
duplicates) and we seem to have 'waiting' for that 'suspension' -
although I still have a hard time wondering why 'waiting and needs_work'
can't be merged, but anyway - this is about abandoned.

Started != Patch_new, if for instance someone was working their way to a
patch but had to have a conversation with the group or something like
that first.

Do people look at the 'patch_abandoned' issues differently compared to
those that have never been started? I don't know I am not a programmer,
but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

> I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the effort of updating all
> the DB.

Well that's a different topic - and the mass edit <ahem> if it worked
properly, would make that trivial. Ideally we ought to be checking that
the really old ones that show some ugly output or similar still apply
today. I did that between issues that were raised since 2.11 for the
2.14 / 15 /16 releases (I forget which now). Just to see we hadn't
inadvertently fixed something or the way it worked was no longer valid,
or it produced a new error and so on.

James

> 
> Yours, Simon
> 
>