Re: Bug#88623: Should not suggest manipulating others' bugs

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Ben Harris <bjh21@cam.ac.uk> wrote in bug #88623:
>Package: developers-reference
>Version: 2.8.4
>Severity: normal
>
>I've been told by Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> that package
>maintainers shouldn't manipulate bugs filed against packages other
>than their own without the permission of those packages' maintainers.
>This clearly conflicts with the Developer's Reference which states (in
>section 10.2 of version 2.8.4:

I don't think this is current practice at all; I've often done what the
developer's reference suggests, particularly when a maintainer appears
to be missing in action, and now and again a maintainer has come back
and thanked me for it. Obviously people should exercise discretion, and
malicious changes to other people's bugs are strongly deprecated, but in
general I think anybody who wants to spend the effort cleaning up bits
of our enormous, sprawling BTS should be encouraged to do so. Maybe if
more people looked at the bug lists for large packages whose maintainers
haven't worked on them for a while then the bug lists might get to the
point where the maintainers could face the task of trying to get it down
further.

I've cc'd this to debian-devel for discussion, as I think discouraging
this practice would be detrimental.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]