That need to close bugs?

[Onno Benschop]

On 12/09/07 06:41, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> Alexandre Strube wrote:
>   
>> I want to raise something here...
>>
>> One of the things that made me take some distance from daily ubuntu 
>> development was a raid of newer people which closes the bugs for 
>> whatever reason. If the bug is not good enough for them, they close. 
>> This is more or less an example:
>>
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43354 
>> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43354>
>>
>>
>> yes, the guy did not provide the information required. Does this mean 
>> that the bug vanished magically? No. In fact, the prism54 status is 
>> REGRESSION from feisty to gutsy. But why would I bother to post a bug, 
>> just to be closed for any reason? (This is only an example. There are 
>> several others)
>>     
>
> I see no mention of Gutsy on that bug, only Dapper. We have to focus on 
> the bugs that have a good chance of being fixed because there are so 
> many reports. That generally means bugs that are confirmed in the 
> development release and have the relevant info attached.
>   
Henrik,

On the face of it your argument is solid, but there are two things that
you do not appear to take into consideration.

   1. Dapper is an LTS release and bugs related to it should be treated
      in a similar fashion to a development release in my opinion. That
      is, they have a higher priority than an Edgy bug.
   2. While Dapper isn't the bleeding edge of Ubuntu, code that exists
      in Dapper exists in Feisty and Gutsy today. That implies that bugs
      that exist in Dapper are also likely to exist. Disk space is
      cheap. A computer is great at searching stuff. Leave the bug in
      the system, leave it open so others can stumble upon it and not
      feel that they are the first to experience this problem. Debugging
      is as much about writing code as it is about the "ah-ha" moment in
      which someone determines the cause of the problem.


> Brian did explicitly write "please reopen it if you can give us the 
> missing information", which seems fair. The submitter gets another 
> reminder of the outstanding bug as it's closed. It may result in a few 
> new bugs being submitted as issues are discovered by other people, but 
> then it's more likely to be tested on a more recent version.
>   
That is fine if the bug is likely to be a one-off-non-repeatable
offender, like say a corrupt file on a file system that has been erased
and reformatted. But I don't think that this bug is in that class.
Having a bug like this closed means there is little chance for casual
visitors to stumble on the bug and link the report to the behaviour
they're seeing.

Most of my personal linux troubleshooting revolves around googling for
output seen on syslog. With a closed bug like the one Alexandre showed
us, do not show up as far as I know.


-- 
Onno Benschop

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