"Fix Released" state for changelog closed bugs

[Jordan Mantha]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 7:37 AM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> writes:
>
>> I've seen a little bit of confusion in the bug tracker about the
>> status of bugs which are marked as "Fix Released" after a package
>> upload has specified the bug number in a changelog.
>>
>> Such bugs are marked as "released" immediately upon the source package
>> upload being completed, but before the package has been built or
>> published, even though a fix for the bug is not available to users.
>> The gap can take hours, and in the case where a package does not build
>> correctly, days.
>
> The confusion is even higher if you consider a fix in a package that
> FTBFS on only some architectures, and the reporter happens to use an
> architecture affected by this new bug.

However, the person who uploaded the package will get notifications of
FTBFS but my guess is most people don't change the status back to
reflect that, they just go ahead and fix the FTBFS. Having "Fix
Released" == "binaries are available for all users on all archs from
all countries ...." is really a bit of work and perhaps not worth
doing in any systematic way.

Perhaps a social approach of saying "if your package is FTBFS on
common/many archs and it's going to be non-trivial to fix, drop a note
on the bugs to let people know" would be more effective. A FTBFS from
a bug fix should be rather rare and transitory as presumably everyone
is testing their uploads *before* uploading.

-Jordan