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Re: policy around 'wontfix' bug tag



On 05/02/18 00:30, Richard Hector wrote:
> On 05/02/18 00:16, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Richard Hector wrote:
>>> When a maintainer tags a bug report with 'wontfix', is there not an
>>> expectation that they will say why?
>>
>> Obviously the Debian Developers have much freedom how to act. At least
>> if it is about packaging and bug report processing.
>>
>> As for Debian policy, in this case it is probably written in
>>   https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#tags
>> which says:
>>   "wontfix
>>    This bug won't be fixed. Possibly because this is a choice between two
>>    arbitrary ways of doing things and the maintainer and submitter prefer
>>    different ways of doing things, possibly because changing the behaviour
>>    will cause other, worse, problems for others, or possibly for other
>>    reasons."
>>
>> If i wondered about such a tag without explanation and felt affected by
>> the bug, then i'd mail to the bug report asking for an explanation.
>>
>>
>>> I was just reading a bug report that seemed valid
>>
>> Mind to share its number ?
> 
> #389251 (coreutils: date's -d switch doesn't honour locale) - it's quite
> an old one. But I found another instance in which the same claim applies:
> 
> richard@zircon:~$ date -d '4/2/2018'
> Mon Apr  2 00:00:00 NZST 2018
> 
> In my NZ locale, that date should be interpreted as 4 Feb.

Actually, a good(ish) explanation is provided in a later bug, #729952:

------8<------
The date parsing feature exists in Debian only for compatibility with
upstream. It is a complete misfeature, and I would prefer that it didn't
exist at all. In an ideal world the entire idea of trying to utilize a
natural language parser would be scrapped in favor of a simple and
regular grammar. Unfortunately, it is what it is. The only way to use
the feature is to experiment until you find something that does what you
want. The corollary to that is that nothing can be changed, because
doing so would break existing scripts that were tweaked to perform
correctly using the current implementation.

Mike Stone
------8<------

Richard

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