Re: PW#5-2: Maintainer's reaction on non-maintainer uploads

[dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman)]

Guy Maor wrote:
> kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
> 
> > I thought we had agreed on
> > 
> >     * If the nmu fixes many bugs, close the bugs, but reopen a new one  
> > with the diffs
> 
> No, there's often times valuable information in the bug report.  What
> if the non-maintainer release doesn't correctly fix the bug?  Only the
> maintainer should close the report.

Closing the report does not destroy that information.  Closed reports 
are expired after 28 days, but that is a separate matter and we have
control over that.

  - We could expect the maintainer to take less than 28 days to read
    a bugreport.

  - If 28 days is too short, it could be extended.  (Currently, closed
    bug reports make up 15% of the archive.  That might give some idea
    about the cost of that.)

  - There could be a separate archive of expired reports, which need
    not have as fancy an interface.  I seem to recall that there is
    such an archive already, it is just not accessible.

  - A new category ("held"?) could be introduced for bugs which are
    closed but should not yet be expired.  If bugs are closed by
    dinstall, use of this category could even be automated for
    non-maintainer uploads.

  - The reports could be placed inside the non-maintainer upload,
    which will make them show up in the diffs.

I think that any of these measures would be preferable to introducing
a new class of "fixed but open" bugs.  Such bugs would interfere with
the attempts to use the bug system as an aid to release engineering,
by making it impossible to determine automatically when a bug has been
dealt with.  It will also make the overviews of bug titles far less
useful, because one will always have to call up the full report to see
if there's a notice about a non-maintainer upload in it.

Richard Braakman