On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 05:33:56AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Sun, Dec 28, 2003 at 09:59:08PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: > > Are you being deliberately obtuse? It limits the effectiveness of the > > package's BTS page as a tool for the maintainer, by requiring it to > > include irrelevant (from the maintainer's POV) bugs that do not > > represent outstanding issues (again from the maintainer's POV). This > > constitutes an ultimatum to the maintainer: acquiesce to the submitter's > > request, or put up with this degradation of the BTS's utility to you. > I think it would be helpful if there were some more guidance given to > developers as to when it's appropriate to close a bug without resolving > it (and when it isn't actually resolved), and when it's appropriate to > simply tag it won't fix. Consider the definition of the "wontfix" tag. > wontfix > This bug won't be fixed. Possibly because this is a choice between > two arbitrary ways of doing things and the maintainer and submitter > prefer different ways of doing things, possibly because changing the > behaviour will cause other, worse, problems for others, or possibly > for other reasons. > The *only* thing this communicates unambiguously is "this bug won't be > fixed". The rest is very vague, and suggestive of nothing but absolute > maintainer discretion for applying the tag. > Given this, why *wasn't* tagging the bug wontfix the correct course of > action? Please explain this using the existing BTS documentation, > keeping in mind that most of the users of our BTS do not have the time > to research the archives of the debian-devel list for explanations of > the disposition of issues reported in our bug tracking system. They > will likely expect that the on-line documentation is sufficient. I would say that tagging this bug wontfix would be *a* correct course of action, but there's no reason to think that it must be *the* correct course of action. Particularly bugs that are moved to a resolved state soon after being opened will tend to not have a fully accurate complement of tags, because that kind of housecleaning is of relatively low priority. And in cases where a wishlist bug is being considered resolved because the maintainer refuses to implement the request, closing it seems perfectly appropriate, with or without the wontfix tag. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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