Colin Watson wrote:
200 days old is actually relatively young for a bug report. The oldest non-wishlist bug against the packages I maintain is 4 years and 175 days old, and the oldest wishlist bug is 5 years and 185 days old. Of course I wasn't actually a developer when those were originally filed, but the fact remains that bugs aren't first-in first-out. Frequently new bugs are more urgent, or the old bugs are just very hard to deal with, independent of the problem of inactive maintainers.Also, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to notify me when a bug is resolved so that I can validate my own experience.When a bug is closed you'll get a mail. If it's fixed in a non-maintainer upload you won't currently, but to some extent that's a separate issue which will eventually be fixed as an indirect result of other work. Cheers,
It's not that I get an email when it's closed, but we have bugs that are outstanding from Debian 2.1 that are supposedly present in Debian3.0. I just scrolled through some of my old bugs that were out there and many of them have been resolved as the result of subsequent upgrades of packages which are in Stable.
This is not a condition where if you upgrade the Debian structure from stable to testing you solve the problem, but a simple upgrade within the Stable branch of Debian is able to resolve this problem. And there is nothing to validate this condition in the process.
Do you even know if the 4 year old bugs are even valid anymore under the Debian-Stable branch? Their original Branch?
Does a Bug remain tied to a package after the package has been upgraded at the upstream level (example is openoffice 1.0.0 to openoffice 1.0.1 or 1.1.0?)
My concern is that if you have a bug registered against your packages, and you subsequently upgrade to a new version of the package as the maintainer, at what point does this bug become as deprecated as the original software?
Or am I just seeing a lot of Debian package maintainers who are not that thorough?
-- "... freedom ... is a worship word..." "It is our worship word too." -- Cloud William and Kirk, "The Omega Glory", stardate unknown