Re: changelog bug-closing should not be used unless the code changes
On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 05:10:12PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> I think that using a delivery mechanism that is explicitly *talking to*
> someone, rather than making a comment in a file that is not part of a
> conversation, tends to result less often in terse and uninformative
> things like:
> * Unreproducable, probably fixed in 2.2, closes: #57026, #42726, #40768
> closes: #45848, #58367, #62990, #40870, #67296, #38897, #60099, #66769
Perhaps so. My assumption was that people who are bad at writing
changelog entries are probably going to be bad at writing emails too,
but maybe I just take my changelogs more seriously than some folks
do. I would never create an entry like that.
And I have gotten email replies to my bug reports that were no more
informative than the above. Some people just aren't very
communicative, and I'm not sure there's much we can do about it.
(Except point and laugh and try to publicly shame them into better
behavior.)
> That's silly. Why should I record "It was user error, Closes: #nnnnn" in
> my changelog? My program has not changed.
Yes, sorry, I was thinking more of the case where the change happened
in an earlier version, or where something else changed earlier to
render the bug irrelevent. Mostly because I just had to deal with a
whole lot of those cases recently, after adopting several packages.
Your first example I would consider borderline (ignoring issues of bad
style for the moment), because it says "probably fixed in 2.2", so it
was probably a change in the package that fixed the bug, so it
probably should go in the changelog.
Bottom line, I would rather see us try to encourage people to write
better changelog entries than try to forbid them from using changelog
closers in certain cases. The former will help produce a better
system overall, while the latter will simply prevent it from getting
worse.
cheers
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
or xtifr@dsp.net | volcaniconi- standalone haiku
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