bug maintenance, last comment.
Scott James Remnant:
> I don't
> consider old bugs to be worthy of discard,
You mean, "I don't consider unreproducible bugs to be worthy of discard,"
right? Old reproducible bugs (like 2531, the third oldest open bug in
Debian) are one thing and they should certainly be kept.
Incidentally, could you take a look at 2531 and respond to my comment of 22
September 2005? My analysis was that it's unreasonable to ask a program
written in perl to use fcntl, and that it's likewise unreasonable to ask for
a complete rewrite of install-info and friends, but that it would make sense
to fix install-info to use flock properly (which it currently doesn't). Or
do you just keep the old bugs open for entertainment value, without any real
intention of paying attention to them?
Old unreproducible bugs are quite another thing, and I *really* don't see why
you keep them open.
Anyway, the patch tag is objectively false for many dpkg bugs according to the
current definition of the tag ("effective, satisfactory fix supplied"), which
is a good way to mislead Debian users.
> and frankly, it's my bug
> list.
OK. But don't expect anyone to *ever* volunteer to help with it if you like
to keep it filled with lying tags (like, say, the "unreproducible" tag on
96813, which was added while it was a bug against debconf; or the 'patch' tag
on 35573, which has been 'patched' since 2002 apparently without maintainer
interest). This is an excellent way both to discourage anyone from trying to
fix bugs in dpkg, and to give the impression that you don't plan to fix them
ever.
Thanks for your maintenance of dpkg. I realize you've had a lot of bugs to
catch up on since you took over. :-P
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