Re: Old, stale bug reports (bug triage)
On Sat 29 Apr 2017 at 14:14:01 +0200, Felix Dietrich wrote:
> songbird <songbird@anthive.com> writes:
>
> > does installing package how-can-i-help help?
>
> Thanks for the suggestion. I will have to spent some time going through
> that list and see if I can find anything that I am able to do.
As Jonathan Dowland said
> ..... there are far, far too many bug reports and not enough people
> working on them. This is one area that people can really make a
> difference in contributing to Debian.
Never a truer word was said. The bug count increases and the bug record
for well-used packages continues to increase. For a start, this makes it
difficult for a user with a problem to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Culling the number of reports is a task which does not necessarily
require much time or deep understanding of the package or the way the
software works. Just some commonsense and the support of the maintainer.
The result would be a cleaner and more useful database of bug reports.
For example, are reports about issues on Squeeze relevant today? The
chances are many will have been fixed by now. Perhaps a lttle judgement
would be required, but, in all probability, most could be closed. Wheezy
too. Consult the submitter to see whether the bug is still reproducible
in unstable. No reply? Close the report after a reasonable time has
passed.
Five-year old wishlist bugs? Read; come to a judgement; close (giving a
sound, decent reason); most are past their sell-by date.
--
Brian.
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