That need to close bugs?

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Sep 28, 2007, at 10:03 PM, Alexander Sack wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 03:07:15PM +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>>
>> And third, some teams use statuses in odd ways. For example, a while 
>> ago the Ubuntu Mozilla team were using "In Progress" when they really 
>> meant "Won't Fix" (I don't know whether they still do this). And as 
>> we've seen from the recent Incomplete fallout, some developers have 
>> been using "Incomplete" for bug reports that aren't actually 
>> incomplete.
>
> I find it interesting that you call other ways to look at bug
> statuses 'odd', while not considering that maybe your intepretation
> sounds odd to me (and probably to others as well).

Of course, if it was all obvious we wouldn't even be having this 
discussion. :-)

The original motivation was to have a status meaning: "The bug isn't 
our fault, and we're not going to do anything to fix or work around it, 
other than notifying the bug's actual source. (E.g. notifying upstream 
if we're a distribution, or notifying the relevant distribution if 
we're upstream.) But other people will still have the problem and 
search for it, so it should still appear in search results by default." 
As opposed to Invalid, which doesn't appear in search results by 
default.

On further thought, though, that use of "Won't Fix" still suffers from 
the scalability problem I mentioned earlier. Ten years from now, for 
any search you did, a large chunk of the results would likely be 
ancient "Won't Fix" bugs. And if we fixed that by hiding "Won't Fix" in 
search results by default, then it would be functionally identical to 
"Invalid", so there'd be no point in having both statuses after all.

> BTW, when the mozilla team setup their workflow, there wasn't a state
> "Won't fix" at all ... and _rejecting_ upstream bugs on ubuntu side is
> just hard to explain to reporters and definitly triggers noise in the
> bug from unhappy reporters. (and btw, I think the same is still valid
> for |Won't fix|).

Yes, I agree that's a problem. I wonder if "Declined" would be a more 
pacific name.

> Anyway, I am open to look at bug statuses used by mozillateam again,
> but not before you have landed your _final_ one and only great way to
> triage bugs ;).
> ...

Fair enough, I'll get back to you in a couple of years. ;-) Meanwhile, 
though, you'll have occasional confusion as people used to reporting 
bugs elsewhere in Launchpad encounter the different meanings you're 
using.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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