Bug#184770: Leaving "shadows" of reassigned bugs
Package: debbugs
Version: unavailable; reported 2003-03-14
Severity: wishlist
This is a problem I've encountered several times, and I know others
have as well (eg, the frozen-bubble maintainer is dealing with it now)
When a bug in one package results in a symptom appearing in another
(for instance, a bug in a library which causes a program to not start),
users tend to report the bug against the program. When the maintainer
reassigns these bugs to the library, they are removed from the visible
bug list of the program; as a result, users who conscientously check the
BTS (yes, all 5 of them :P ) before filing bugs won't see them. This
tends to result in a semi-infinite stream of bug reports.
One way to deal with this would be a variant of the "reassign" command
which leaves behind a "shadow" of the reassigned bug. The "shadow"
should probably be marked as having been reassigned, and it should be
removed (or moved to the "closed" category) when the other bug is
closed. This is different from the "clone" command in that it doesn't
actually create a new bug; instead, it creates a reference to the bug
which has been reassigned. (it might be worthwhile, though, to preserve
the original title on the "shadow", since that would refer to the bug's
symptom -- reassigned bugs often get retitled to reflect the actual
cause)
I think this would help cut down on duplicate bug report, and it has
less overhead for maintainers than current ways of handling this
situation (such as cloning the bug and then closing the clone manually)
Daniel
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux torrent.burrows.local 2.4.20 #4 Wed Feb 26 19:55:42 EST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (ignored: LC_ALL set)
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| "I've struggled with reality for thirty-five years, |
| but I'm glad to say that I finally won." |
| -- _Harvey_ |
\----------------- The Turtle Moves! -- http://www.lspace.org ----------------/
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