Auto Bug Expiry on Launchpad

[C de-Avillez]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:47:05 +0100
Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 

I have opened a BP on this [1] (and others, still to be discussed).

Input is appreciated.

Cheers,

[1]
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-qa-n-triage-revisited
-- 
C de-Avillez
IRC: hggdh

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