[rfc] bug handling priorities

[Martin Pool]

2009/5/28 Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com>:

> One of the things you should not do often is to start asking
> questions/for more debug info and then forget about the bug. It's just
> a waste of the reporter's and your time, and will create frustration
> on the reporter side.

That's a really fascinating and provocative idea.  You're right that
there is a psychological effect, and gathering more information on a
bug where that information is never likely to be used is a waste.
However we do do it all the time.

In particular if the bug seems really weird I always want to ask about
it, but many of them do just seem like freaks specific to one
environmental interaction and so unlikely to be fixed soon.  In some
cases it turns out it is a user error or environmental problem, and
it's kind of nice to be able to just close them as invalid or to tell
the user what to do.  But this is inefficient if it's only going to
distinguish between a bug you won't fix yet because it's minor, and
one you won't fix because it's obscure.

So valid reasons to do it might be:

 * an answer to the question might potentially convince you that it
needs to be fixed soon
 * getting enough data to be reasonably confident its a dupe or to
identify dupes in future
 * perhaps getting it to a state where the reporter or some other less
experienced person can work on it

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>