Re: [Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#532856: Bug#532856: closed by Mathieu Parent <math.parent@gmail.com> (Closing " umask settings overridden by Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) clients")
On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 04:49:57PM +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 07/02/2018 01:14 AM, Josip Rodin wrote:
> > The Debian social contract doesn't go into that much detail, to explicitly
> > require keeping bugs open because they exist in practice -- but common sense
> > and decades of precedent do.
>
> I very much don't agree with the above. It is useless to keep bugs open
> if they are not actionable. Bugs are reminders for the maintainers of
> what they should do. If they can't do anything, then it goes on the way
> to do useful things, and it is best if they can be closed.
I don't know how you happen to define the word actionable, but English
dictionaries say it's "capable of being acted on" or ready to be put into
action". In all cases, these kinds of bugs could still get picked up by
someone and acted upon (unarchived, reopened, forwarded upstream, possibly
with a fix, closed when a package is released containing one).
This idea that the bug reports of a package are merely a tool for the
maintainer, who is at the same time able to arbitrarily decide that they
can't do anything and that it's getting in their way... that seems way too
possessive and against the spirit of the relevant part of the social
contract. The bug report database should never be a personal fief of the
maintainers, instead its primary purpose should be - to provide a useful
service to users.
https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#closing spells things out nicely
right at the start. I can understand tolerating hard cases with difficult
packages, but we should not advocate a degradation of the golden standard
because of outliers.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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