Auto Bug Expiry on Launchpad

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 06:19:07PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Friday, October 15, 2010 05:47:10 pm Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 03:44:17PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > > Why are we convinced throwing away bugs is a good idea?
> > 
> > Thank you for helping to make Ubuntu better!
> > 
> > Unfortunately, you've not provided enough information for us to respond
> > to the issue you've raised.  We are marking your email Incomplete for
> > now; it will expire in 30 days if we do not hear from you by then.
> 
> Right.  That's the brush off we give people when we throw their bugs away.  It 
> doesn't explain why that's a good idea.  
> 
> A bug may lack sufficient information about a problem to enable a developer to 
> immediately address it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't describe a real issue 
> with the system.

My experience is that bugs on packages I work on are often set to
Incomplete when *somebody else* thinks that *I* don't have enough
information to address them.  The problem here should be obvious: the
people setting bugs to Incomplete often do not themselves sufficiently
understand them to make that kind of judgement.  I, in turn, do not have
time to keep going through and correcting all the bugs that are
incorrectly set to Incomplete (sometimes even after I have left a
detailed comment on the bug explaining why it happens and roughly what
needs to be done to fix it!), and the more noise that is generated by
this kind of thing the harder the problem gets.  At this point I regard
bug statuses as essentially random, bearing little relation to the true
state of a bug report unless either (a) the maintainer has rather more
time to garden bugs than I seem to have or (b) the bug is
release-critical.

I continue to fail to understand why we seem to guide newcomers towards
bug triage.  Triage is a skilled task requiring both substantial
technical understanding and strong social skills, and is not something
that should be given to newcomers.  The analogy implied by the very term
we use for it is a triage nurse, and nobody expects people to be able to
wander into a hospital off the street and start deciding whether other
people need to see a doctor or not.  Encouraging unskilled people to do
this important work merely devalues it, and does not help developers.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]