On Thu, Dec 25, 2003 at 09:02:50PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> It is, and was, a wishlist item.
It was a wishlist item. Anyone can have a wish, but not every wish someone
might have needs to be kept as an open bug in the BTS. Enrico's desire --
to put a field in ifupdown to say which interfaces should have particular
tests run on them -- is easily met with the current syntax: you have a field
test-foo yes
or you have a field:
enrico-tests foo baz bar
Enrico finds these options aesthetically displeasing. Which is his opinion,
and he's entitled to it, but that he holds an opinion doesn't warrant a bug
kept open forever in the BTS.
He can either implement the fields in a way that works now, or a way that
will never work. In neither case does an open bug help anyone.
> Closing a wishlist item that has any kind of internal sense to it
> (against the wisher's wish, that is) should not be the Right Thing
Sorry, but it's the maintainer's wishes that count, in all
cases. "wontfix" isn't there to allow people to junk up the BTS with
whatever they like, it's there for *maintainers* to keep particular
reports around for valid issues that they are for various reasons
unreasonable to fix.
> So the package maintainer does not agree that the wished-for behavior
> is actually desirable. That is his privilege, and what the "wontfix"
> tag is there for.
No, it's not. It's there purely for the maintainer: either to appease
obnoxious submitters if the maintainer feels so inclined, or to keep an
issue that can't be fixed available for reference.
> The maintainer's insisting on closing the wishlist
> item simply because he disagrees with the way the reporter wants to
> use the software, seems very misplaced.
If you want a favour done, acting obnoxiously and trying to make it into
a demand seems more out of place.
> It's not as if keeping it open
> would somehow compel the maintainer to do anything about it, or if
> having many open wishlist items would make the maintainer look
> negligent in the eyes of people with any soft of clue.
Keeping bugs open that needn't be makes it hard for people to find
the issues that could use assistance; whether that be the maintainer
or helpers.
> Furthermore, I find it rather disquieting that the maintainer's last
> argument in the BTS logs is an appeal to his own authority as BTS
> owner and a threat to block the reporter's access to the BTS unless he
> stops wishing for the feature he wishes:
I'm happy to do the same thing for any other maintainer who is being
attacked by someone who's trying to use the BTS reopen command to force
a maintainer to do things against their better judgement.
> It seems that the maintainer has fundamentally misunderstood what
> wishlist items are for (how can a wishlist item serve to "force"
> anything? how can it be "abuse" to register a wish using the project's
> documented interface for tracking wishes?), which is strange given
> that he is actually one of the administrators of the BTS.
Well *someone's* misunderstood something. Given I'm a BTS admin, given
that I created the "wontfix" tag, and given that I've been around longer
than Enrico, are you sure you're not jumping to the wrong conclusion?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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