Restoring the status of automatically expired bugs

[Jordan Mantha]

Just to be clear as I'm not quite sure, are *all* Janitor-closed bugs
going to be reverted or just the ones that were closed in error?

-Jordan Mantha

On 10/9/07, Matthew Revell <matthew.revell at canonical.com> wrote:
> Shortly after we released Launchpad 1.1.9 (on 21 September),
> Launchpad's housekeeping system - the Launchpad Janitor - expired
> 2,862 Incomplete bugs. We estimate that around 900 of these bugs
> should not have been expired.
>
> We're sorry for the confusion and inconvenience that this caused. We
> will restore the "Incomplete" status of all bugs that the Launchpad
> Janitor expired. This process will begin at 12.00 UTC on 10th October.
>
>
> What went wrong
> ===============
>
> The feedback that you've given us has highlighted three flaws in the
> bug expiration process we used:
>
> 1. We expired duplicate bugs: this went against our policy that
> duplicate bugs should not be modified, nor should they generate email.
>
> 2. We expired bugs that were still being triaged: recent comment
> activity showed that these bugs had not been abandoned but our process
> didn't take account of that.
>
> 3. We expired bugs that were confirmed or fixed in another location:
> once a bug is confirmed in one location, it should not be incomplete
> in another. Bug contacts are responsible for managing a bug's many
> statuses once it is confirmed in one location.
>
>
> Understanding Launchpad's bug statuses
> ======================================
>
> While we were reviewing these issues, we discovered that many people
> are using the Incomplete status to mean something other than "this
> report cannot be confirmed to be a bug, additional information is
> needed". The comments and activity of roughly 20% of the Incomplete
> reports suggest that Confirmed or Wont Fix would have been a more
> appropriate status.
>
> In light of this, we've written a blog post looking at how and when to
> use the various bug statuses that Launchpad offers:
>
> http://news.launchpad.net/general/of-bugs-and-statuses
>
>
> How we're going to fix this
> ===========================
>
> Now that we know that many people have used the Incomplete status to
> mean a number of different things, we are going to restore the
> Incomplete status of all bugs that the Launchpad Janitor changed.
>
> During this process:
>
>  * Comments left by the Janitor will be removed from those bugs that
>    have their status restored.
>  * The updates will not generate email.
>  * We won't alter the status of any bug if its status has been
>    manually altered since the expiration.
>
> We still believe that our original intention -- to remove abandoned
> bugs from bug queues -- will be a useful enhancement to Launchpad.
> We're going to fix the three flaws in the expiration process and then
> email selected projects' bug contacts with a list of the bugs that we
> have identified as abandoned. With your feedback, we will refine this
> process. We will only resume the expiry process when the Launchpad
> user community is happy with the way we identify abandoned bugs.
>
> We will also update the Launchpad documentation to ensure it explains
> the bug statuses more thoroughly and we will make that documentation
> easier to find.
>
> Thank you for your ongoing feedback and for helping us to refine this
> process.
>
> --
> Matthew Revell
> launchpad.net
>
> mrevell in #launchpad on Freenode
>
> --
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>
>


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