Please don't bother setting already-duplicated bugs to Rejected!

[Ryan O'Connor]

If the bug in fact turns out to not be a duplicate (someone marked it
wrong), then you might want to change it's status to rejected. It would
be rare, but limiting the ability in this case may case problems like
that.

Ryan


On Thu, 2006-10-19 at 08:47 +1000, Lex Hider wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 October 2006 09:17, Colin Watson wrote:
> > In an attempt to be helpful, a bug triager just went through a bunch of
> > my bugs that I marked as duplicates of other bugs ages ago, and set the
> > Status of all of them to Rejected.
> >
> > This causes Malone to send huge piles of e-mail to huge numbers of
> > people. For each bug you mark as Rejected, it sends an e-mail to every
> > subscriber to the duplicate bug *target*, i.e. the master bug (at least,
> > this is my belief based on complaints received). In this case, the bug
> > target was one of the most-duplicated bugs in Ubuntu, with so many
> > subscribers that Malone currently times out trying to display the bug at
> > all. The effect is to waste lots of people's time, and bug reporters put
> > off ever filing Ubuntu bugs again because of the amount of e-mail they
> > get as a result.
> >
> > More to the point, though, rejecting duplicate bugs is totally
> > unnecessary. It's already marked as a duplicate, and excluded from
> > Malone searches by default, so why bother? "Rejected" also sends the
> > wrong message to a bug reporter who sent a perfectly valid bug report,
> > but just happened not to be the first person to do so (or, in some
> > cases, not even that; the responsible developer might simply have first
> > identified the issue from a different bug). And, if the bug turns out
> > not to be a duplicate as previously thought, then messing with the
> > status means that there's one more thing to revert when restoring the
> > bug's independent existence.
> >
> > Please don't contribute to the increasing entropy of the universe -
> > don't touch the status of duplicate bugs!
> >
> 
> I was wondering to what extent this could be fixed on the launchpad side. If 
> it's a bad idea to reject duplicate bugs, why not make it impossible?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Lex.
>