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wontfix and maintainer turnover



On Friday 09 January 2004 12:22 pm, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 03:00:03PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Perhaps what one person finds too difficult, or lacks the time to
> > implement, is something another person might be able to accomplish.
>
> My experience has been that wishlist bugs of that kind tend to get left
> open - the wishlists that get rejected tend to be rejected because the
> maintainer doesn't think it'd be a good idea to do whatever is being
> asked.

See #165101 for an example of Branden's scenario: previous maintainer tagged 
it upstream, wontfix.  When I adopted the package (libghttp), I figured I had 
better look over the source code anyway, and fixed the bug.  This one happens 
to be priority normal, but it's an example of how it's beneficial to a new 
maintainer if the previous maintainers used wontfix instead of closing 
unresolved bugs.

The wontfix tag is an effective way for the maintainer to communicate a 
judgment about the bug / suggestion without making it hard for a later 
maintainer to reach a different judgment.  It would be nice to have a 
corresponding "willfix" tag (i. e., in the maintainer's judgment this is a 
good idea and implementing it should be given priority).  Then a BTS view 
that sorts willfix > nil > wontfix would show the maintainer's priority axis 
as distinct from the bug severity axis.

- Michael



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