Re: reportbug wishlist
On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 07:52:49AM -0500, Tom Allison wrote:
[Please reply just to the list; I read the list and prefer not to have
additional copies of messages in my inbox. Thanks.]
> Colin Watson wrote:
> >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.
>
> 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.
If nobody has actually tested whether they're fixed, there can be no way
for you to be notified unless someone does that testing. If you find
that a bug you've submitted is no longer valid, please close it.
Only the maintainer or the submitter is supposed to close a bug. This is
so that bugs don't disappear off into the archive while no-one is paying
attention to them. This might sometimes mean that somebody else has
observed that a bug is fixed, but nobody has actually been paying enough
attention to close it. Also note that if you mail nnnnnn@bugs.debian.org
then this is *not* forwarded to the submitter; you might have missed
some messages as a result if people have been careless.
> Do you even know if the 4 year old bugs are even valid anymore
> under the Debian-Stable branch? Their original Branch?
In the case of the bugs I mentioned, yes, I'm certain that most of them
are still valid, thank you. I haven't reviewed all the base-passwd bugs
yet, but there isn't anything obviously closeable there or I'd have
closed it already. I have ideas on how to solve some of the older
wishlists, although they're significant programming projects.
And actually I don't care whether they're resolved in stable, to a first
approximation. Development work takes place in unstable, so generally I
only care whether bugs are fixed there.
> 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?)
Of course: it has to. Bugs are *only* ever closed due to manual action.
If the package name is changed, the bug has to be reassigned manually,
but it should certainly never disappear just because somebody somewhere
upped a version number. I don't see how that could ever make sense.
> 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?
What could the upstream version have to do with it? New upstream
versions of Debian packages don't automatically close bugs. They *must*
be manually checked, either by the maintainer or by some other helpful
volunteer; there's no other way to do it.
> Or am I just seeing a lot of Debian package maintainers who are
> not that thorough?
Quite possibly, yes. It does, regrettably, happen.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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