Re: General bug policy
jdassen@wi.leidenuniv.nl writes:
> On Tue, Apr 07, 1998 at 10:39:42PM +0100, James Troup wrote:
> > and ask the maintainer to close them, but the maintainer should be
> > the one closing bugs, not some random individual on a clean up
> > crusade.
>
> I think this is an issue where it is difficult to lay down rules
> that cover all practical cases.
I see four possible valid parties for closing bugs:
* party is the maintainer
* party is the submitter
* party has been given permission by the maintainer to close the bug
(i.e., the maintainer is soliciting support from another developer
to help with package maintenance).
Yes I think this should be stated in our policy.
> I have on occassion closed bugs from packages I don't maintain
> (e.g. reports that resulted from spam; bugs that were reported and
> fixed earlier (which happens frequently with major problems like the
> recent grep and xlib6-is-a-libc6-lib bugs)); so far I have not
> received complaints about this.
It's risky; I think we should state, but not enforce, that a
non-maintainer or non-submitter closing a bug has explicit
authorization to do so from the package maintainer.
Remember the policy (which I don't recall was made official) that
non-maintainer-uploads of a package be handled in the following manner
with respect to bug fixes fixed in NMUs:
* submit diff fixing bug to bug system, mention the NMU version number
* move bug to severity "fixed"
Note the rather explicit directive that since the
non-maintainer-uploader is not the package maintainer, that party
should not close the bug.
> Now that we're discussing closing bugs; what about other
> manipulations of bug reports ((un)merge, reassign,
> assigning/modifying severity etc.)? Even if we introduce strict
> rules on closing bugs, I don't think it's a good idea to apply these
> rules to the other manipulations withouth careful study.
I have merged and reassigned bugs for packages I do not maintain. I
asked first here before doing so; the overwhelming majority of package
maintainers felt that it was fine for me to do so. Perhaps we should
stipulate that these operations can be done by any registered Debian
developer?
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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