Re: Branden's Platform in German, Spanish, Italian, and (some) French
* Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> [2004-03-19 20:15]:
> In some completely different contexts, some people swear by "the
> only person who can close a bug is the person who opened it in the
> first place". For example,
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000029.html (and
> search for that text).
>
> Do you [or Martin [or the tamagotchi]] have any thoughts on this?
I agree in principle that it would be nice if bug submitters gave more
feedback when a bug is closed and ideally confirm that the issue has
indeed been resolved. However, I'm not sure we should make this a
requirement. In a commercial environment with paid testers, they will
usually test the fix and report whether it addresses the problem or
not. In free software and Debian, a wide range of people submit bugs,
and while some will confirm that an upload addresses their bug, others
might not do so (or their email address might bounce, etc). So if we
required bug submitters to confirm that the bug has been addresses, it
should be taken as resolved if they don't confirm within 4 or 8 weeks.
As I balance, I think we should make it clearer to bug submitters that
they can re-open bugs and that feedback is encouraged.
I'm also not entirely happy that bugs are closed even if the fix is
not in stable or testing yet. Fortunately, Colin Watson has been
working on version tracking which will allow the BTS to show in which
version a bug has been fixed. He told me the system will go live RSN.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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