What to do with the very old bugs? [Was: Re: Bug#265831: Obsolete bugreports for 2.4]
On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 08:56:34PM +0200, David Schmitt wrote:
> On Saturday 28 October 2006 07:10, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the work you are doing
> > on kernel bugs. It seems like these days nobody on the team has time
> > left over to do any serious bug tracking, especially deal with the
> > bugs which are sitting in the BTS forever. I hope you will not be
> > discouraged by Steve's note. [...]
>
>
> Thank you for your kind words and no worries. Indeed I very much appreciate
> any feedback, I'd have been surprised, had I not made any error.
>
> Looking at the other bug reports I closed with this mail[1], 212678 and 298136
> seem unresolved too, 304248 is deep within the PCI subsystem arch code while
> 145504 seems to be fixed but unconfirmed. I'd reopen the first two but I'd
> let the other two die.
I had a quick look at these bugs, and it seems pretty hopeless that
submitters will provide any feedback at that point. I think (and I'm
not neccessarily right :-), so it would be nice if other members of
the team would comment) that a sensible strategy to handle such
bugs would be:
1. Try to figure out whether the bug is solved. That may be done by
verifying that it is fixed (if feasible) or searching the changelogs,
current bugs and upstream bugzilla to see whether anything similar has
been reported. Looking at the git history of relevant files might also
give a clue, unfortunately it does not extend that far back.
2. If not, usertag the bug with something like
'very-old-status-unknown' (using user debian-kernel@lists.debian.org),
ping the bug, and give some reasonable grace period (1 month?) for
submitter to respond. Usertags in general are a useful tool, there was
at some time an effort to create a system of kernel team usertags, but
AFAIK it never went anywhere (the page is probably still somewhere on
the wiki though).
3. If no ping is received within this time, close the bug. Not quite
sure what would be the best version to use when closing, however I
don't really think it matters too much here (it should exist though
:-).
Best regards,
--
Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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