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List:       debian-devel
Subject:    Re: Consensus on closing old bugs
From:       Tomas Pospisek <tpo2 () sourcepole ! ch>
Date:       2023-02-06 13:46:06
Message-ID: a429d3dc-1653-2d06-2309-95ef124318e9 () sourcepole ! ch
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On 06.02.23 11:51, Santiago Vila wrote:
> El 6/2/23 a las 11:26, Brian Thompson escribió:
>> I understand that the usual way to close out bug reports is having the
>> original author do it themselves.   What's the policy on closing bug 
>> reports
>> that haven't had activity in over 6 months?
> 
> Let the maintainers handle their bugs.
> Old bugs should not be closed just because they are "old".
> 
> For example, I have an open bug which is 26 years old:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=5898
> 
> and I don't see any reason to close it.

However I'd like to put Santiago's reply into perspective (I am not 
contradicting him!):

There's *a lot* of Debian packages that are not maintained very 
actively. Often when I report bugs against some package I will do a bit 
of triage as a "recompensation" for being allowed to report it and for 
the time the maintainer will have to invest in reading my bug report.

So when I see f.ex. reports against versions of the package against old 
Debian releases, that are no longer supported where the last entry in 
the bug report is the maintainer asking a question that hasn't been 
replied to in years, then I go and close that bug report.

I do explain why I am closing it (version not supported any more, there 
are more recent package versions where probably the bug was fixed (if 
that's really the case!), no reply from reporter, thus it's not expected 
that anything will ever come out of the report any more). And I am also 
explaining that closing the bug might be in error, and excusing myself 
if that would be the case and asking the reporter to please reopen the 
bug or to tell me then I will. That is because I can never fully know 
the context of the reporter and thus that bug might be important to the 
reporter (or the maintainer).

All that said, I have never received negative feedback to these bug 
triages that I am occassionaly doing and am under the impression that 
the maintainers *do* appreciate someone going over their packages bugs 
from time to time and closing bugs that to the best of one's judgement 
will not be taken care of any more.

I have to emphasize that the place that I am coming from is that I 
absolutely despise all the robots (f.ex. on github or in launchpad) that 
are roaming around and automatically closing (my!) old bugreports, since 
I have put effort in them and I feel my efforts get shat on when this 
occurs. So that's the angle I'm working from: I absolutely want to 
respect the bug reporter and his effort and possibly the importance 
she's attaching to to some problem that she is eperiencing or has 
experienced. Same for the maintainer that possibly wants to keep his 
package clean and bug-less and puts effort into the reports against his 
packages and cares even about old stuff that *still* doesn't work.

In short, my advice:

* please *do* triage other maintainer's bugs - after all Debian is a 
*collaborative* effort. It is very much appreciated (at least by me).
* please put respect for the reporter and the maintainer and their 
efforts first before any other concerns such as efficiency

Thanks for caring!
*t

PS: Dear reader please correct me or add to if what I'm arguing above is 
wrong.

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