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

[Colin Watson]

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!

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]