Re: Release-critical Bugreport for August 27, 1999
On Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 09:39:42PM -0400, Branden Robinson wrote:
> Please stop this idiocy. For as long as I have used Debian, (almost 4
> years now), bugs have been closed when a package was uploaded to master
> that fixed them.
>
> Bugfixing is a development process.
I hope you don't think it is only this. Bugfixing is also a release
maintenance process, and the bug list is a support channel.
Release maintenance means that important bugs against stable packages should
be fixed in a stable point release. If you felt confident that package
updates would not be left out of the point release if the bugs were closed,
then it would be fine to close these bugs. However, I could argue that
leaving the bugs fixed would be a helpful reminder.
The support channel argument is stronger. It is plain discourteous to users
of the stable release to remove information about bugs in that release (my
understanding is that closing bugs removes them from the archive after a
short time, or otherwise makes them inaccessible to users). Especially
since a "fixed" bug report will likely tell the users exactly what to do to
solve the problem.
Bug versioning and other BTS improvement could give us better mechanisms for
dealing with this, but within the current bug tracking infrastructure, I
strongly feel that bugs against stable packages must remain open until they
are fixed in a stable release.
Andrew
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