Re: unarchiving

[Bob Proulx]

Karl Berry wrote:
> I dislike the "archiving" of bugs (especially so quickly). For me it
> just gets in the way. Can it be disabled for automake and
> automake-patches?
>
> I brought this up before, and I think the answer was no, but just
> thought I'd ask again, more directly. --thanks, karl.

I don't know where this is done and so I don't have an answer but I
did want to make a related comment.  Therefore this is not a response
directly about your question but rather indirectly about why archiving
exists at all.

Archiving of bugs is mostly an anti-spam control.  Because BTS tickets
are simply email addresses then a BTS with a large number of tickets
has the potential to receive a large amount of spam.  That spam then
goes into the tickets which then needs to be removed or it will fund
the spammer's link spam and other reasons why they are spamming.

Therefore the idea behind archiving is that the current set of bug
tickets will be comprised only of open bug tickets.  Those are open
for modification.  Those are open for spamming.  But closed bug
tickets would be archived after some interval and those would then be
unavailable for spamming.  This reduces the amount of ticket spam and
anti-spam that is theoretically needed to maintain a BTS site.

Conceptually if we did not have spam in the tickets then we would not
need to have archiving at all.  Since it is mostly an antispam
feature.

You might see where this is going.  We have added different anti-spam
on the GNU BTS in that all mail to it goes through a mailman mailing
list and that uses the listhelper system as a frontend filter.
Meaning that I don't think we have a spam problem in the tickets
really at all as far as I know.

Perhaps this means that archiving could actually be globally disabled?
Or at the least delayed past the usual 30 days to a significantly
longer day?

Sorry I must return to a different task and don't have time to peek
into how the archive delay is set and whether it can be easily tuned.
I just wanted to add that comment.

Bob