A responsible use of the "incomplete" status.

[Sarah Hobbs]

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You know, it's mails like this that make me really feel that it's not
worth triaging bugs, or aiming for a reasonably decent QA.

It's when you start dealing with ~1000 bugs over a few source packages
that this kind of stuff gets interesting.  Yes, one bug would be easy
enough.  1000?  Now that takes a while.  And then when we get whined at
because the bug situation isn't good enough...what's the point in
attempting to sanitize it at all?

Hope someone has some good luck in finding more bug triagers!

(and erk, long backlogs of email!)

Hobbsee

Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> On 22/09/2007 Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> 60 days is to short.  Even if we set a time, there are classes of bugs (such 
>> as crashes) that even if incomplete are not invalid (a crash bug is always a 
>> bug).  I don't think bugs should get marked invalid except manually.
> 
> Also, how do we deal with the (not so uncommon, about 10% of my reports)
> case when who asked for information does not actively return to the
> report and change its status/triage it when information is provided? I
> used to patiently wait until he/she recalled to read what I said.
> 
> However, a bug report which is flagged as "incomplete" will be buried,
> because neither developers nor other members of the bug squad will look
> at it. If a bug is flagged as incomplete everybody seems to be assuming
> that if it stays in that status for many days it's entirely the
> reporter's fault. It's not so. People marks bugs as incomplete and then
> forgets about them. I think I also know a possible reason: there isn't a
> way to list "bugs that I marked incomplete/invalid/whatever" in LP. This
> should be implemented as soon as possible.
> 
> Now a person's todo list may be as long as you please, but a three lines
> reply and changing status of a bug doesn't take more than 2 minutes. And
> if you don't have these 2 minutes, why did you mark the bug as
> incomplete in principle? You should have known that it would in practice
> bring the report under your sole responsibility.
> 
> I am already actively working on bugs myself, even though I don't have
> the time to apply for -qa team, so I am not speaking as just an user or
> a bug reporter. I think that whoever opens a bug should feel responsible
> for providing further information if requested, and on the other side
> whoever asks for more information should feel responsible of reading the
> reply. Sometimes it takes time to provide requested information, so why
> should be waste users time by leaving bugs in the "incomplete" limbo? Or
> even automatically closing them?
> 
> So the sense of the e-mail is: do whatever you want with automatically
> closing incomplete bugs, but become responsible when you use that mark,
> and don't leave replies on your todo list for more than 7 days. It may
> be hard, but if you don't have time to do that, then just don't triage
> bugs, just like if you don't have time to write anything else than
> "ubuntu is broken" you shouldn't be really reporting bugs.
> 
> My 3 or 4 cents,
> 
> Vincenzo
> 
> 
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