Backtracing, Invalidated Bugs and Quality

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:42:31 +1000 "Null Ack" <nullack at gmail.com> wrote:
>Evening Devs,
>
>Tonight I was doing some of my test suite and I had the
>tracker-preferences crash unexpectedly doing routine workflow with
>viewing (not changing) preferences. Apport came through and I ended up
>at an invalid existing bug from 2007 because the user had not
>submitted debugging symbols. This has happened to me before and my
>mind has been busy since with thinking about how this detracts from
>quality and what to do about it. These are real bugs, some of them are
>in production, that are not being fixed.

I think this is important.  It seems to me that marking bugs invalid 
because they don't have enough information to fix them detracts from having 
a good understanding of the state of our system.  

Crashes are particularly problematic since duplicates of invalid bugs do 
not show in the default search results.  This means that if apport rightly 
dupes to a bug marked invalid, it can automatically become essentially 
invisible.

Modulo stupid sysadmin tricks that can put a system in an unsupportable 
state, crashes are always bugs and should not be casually thrown away.

Scott K