[Libreoffice-qa] Stagnant NEEDINFO bugs

[Petr Mladek]

Alex Thurgood píše v St 06. 02. 2013 v 10:40 +0100:
> Le 05/02/2013 13:03, Petr Mladek a écrit :
> 
> All,
> 
> After suffering from the last two mass closure / re-initialisations of
> status of a fair number of bugs I had spent time in opening, but for
> lack of a dedicated developer / interest in those particular areas of LO
> at the time (OSX bugs, Base bugs) they never got any attention, I for
> one, will not be interested in this happening yet again.
> 
> IMO, the rationale behind closing bugs in this way, i.e. "let's do it
> and if the user/reporter is really motivated he/she is bound to get
> back" sends completely the wrong message to the user community at large:
> 
> - it assumes that casual users/reporters are heavily implicated in the
> project, or at least enough to defend their bug report tooth and nail;
> 
> - that many of these bug reports are fallacious or fanciful.
> 
> While some of them might well fall into the second category, I fear that
> many are from people who were incited to use the bug submission
> assistant after encountering a troublesome or even serious problem in
> their usage of the product and are then expected to get the "community
> fervour". The reality of this is that if you make a tool easily
> accessible for reporting bugs, then people simply expect that report to
> be followed up on by someone else, more knowledgeable. This doesn't mean
> that their bug report is any less worthy or relevant just because they
> don't then follow-up.
> 
> To me, the solution being proposed is yet another high-handed way of
> "improving the stats" without due regard to those who made the effort in
> the first place to submit a report.

I understand the point. The question is what is the future of these
bugs. Is anyone actively working on them? Is anyone going to work on
them?

Another solution would be to say that these bugs need triaging. Triagers
might schedule these bugs for another review after 1 month in the state
NEEDINFO. They might do their best to reproduce the bug and provide the
needed information. If they are not able to reproduce it, they might
close them as WORKSFORME.

The question is if we have resources to do this. AFAIK, triaggers have
hard times to sort the good UNCONFIRMED bugs these days.


IMHO, this whole discussion is not about statistics but about clean
state and resources.

We want to have bugzilla in a good state because it makes easier to
monitor the state of the product, prioritize, ... Just imagine where we
might end after few years.

The resources are limited. The question is how to use them optimally and
what is better for the product. If triaggers and developers spend more
time with poorly reported bugs, it might delay other important bugs and
annoy more users in the end.

BTW: Users get the product for free. We might expect some contribution
from them as well.


Anyway, this mostly affect the life of bug triagers. If most triagers
are against the mass close, we should not do it. This is why we vote
here :-)


Best Regards,
Petr