Dealing with emacs21 (and related) bugs [was: Re: ignoring bugs with no maintainer]

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Andrei POPESCU writes ("Dealing with emacs21 (and related) bugs [was: Re: ignoring bugs with no maintainer]"):
> On Jo, 15 mai 14, 13:43:31, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > One of my bugs was involved in this situation and I was one of the
> > people (the person?) who objected.  I contacted the maintainer who
> > agreed with me that the bugs should not have been closed.  After
> > discussion the contributor's actions were reverted.
>  
> My impression (unknown-package@ wasn't CCed from the beginning) was that 
> the objection was a bit confrontational. I can't tell if this was the 
> cause, but the contributor reverted all his changes as requested and 
> hasn't touched any orphaned bug since.

A copy of my objection (with the contributor's identity removed) is
below.  You see I wrote `one "Someone"'.  That's because the
contributor provided only a one-word name (which was maybe some kind
of nickname or handle).

The subsequent email conversation with the bug-closing contributor
gave me the impression that they were unrepentant, in the sense that
they still believed what they had done was best, but were undoing it
anyway.

> I completely agree that the maintainer should be contacted. What should 
> happen if the maintainer doesn't react?

Then things should be left as they are.  Closing old bugs in this way
is a fairly drastic action that shouldn't be done without permission.

> For this concrete case, might I suggest following course of action:

No.

Firstly, you are once again treading on the maintainer's feet.


Secondly, I disagree that any action along these lines is needed.

162 longstanding bugs is not an unmanageable number for a package like
Emacs.

> 1. ping all submitters of emacs21 (and related) bugs to test against 
> recent emacs (at a minimum emacs23 from wheezy) and deal with the bug as 
> needed

No.  Rather, if a contributor wants to help reduce the backlog of
possibly-obsolete emacs bugs, they should consider each bug
individually.

For example, one of the oldest open emacs bugs is my own bug #9741
from May 1997.  It should clearly remain open.  There is no point
asking anyone to reproduce it every year or two, until there is some
reason to believe that it has been fixed.

> 2. if no response within a reasonable amount of time (3 months?) 
> mass-close them

I would certainly not suggest that the maintainer to do that.  That's
a drastic measure which should be applied only in the direst of cases.


Ian.


From: Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
To: Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>
Cc: Someone,
    owner@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Mass bug closure by "helpful" person, of emacs21 bugs
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 12:27:05 +0000

I have just had two bug reports closed by one "Someone", who writes:

  Hi! I'm closing this bug, since it affected emacs21, and the current
  version is 23. If you still encounter this problem, please feel free to
  re-open it and move it to the appropriate package, or ask me to do it.

Rob, is this really your intended approach to emacs bugs ?

It seems to me that the right thing is probably to reassign these old
bugs to a more recent version of emacs, unless there is a reason to do
otherwise.

Someone: have you been doing this with other packages too ?

owner@bugs: Do we have any facility for reverting all of the changes
made by a particular person ?

Thanks,
Ian.