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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: [Fwd: [Bug 84101] In the KCM,
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2008-11-20 17:57:24
Message-ID: 200811201057.24772.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Thursday 20 November 2008, Daniel Winter wrote:
> Am Thursday 20 November 2008 07:20:07 schrieb James Richard Tyrer:
> > Guess that you didn't read the bug either.  I assigned it to myself and
> > then fixed it.  Strange thing is that even after I assigned it to myself
> > that someone still insisted on closing it.
>
> Well, I think you are right.

it is, of course, absolutely fine for people to fix any bug they wish.

> Although aRts has no maintainer and is not active developed at all, it is
> still widely used. As long as there are a lot of users there is possible
> interest to report and also fix such bugs. Some of those users (or distros
> or it departements who are responsible for KDE 3 setups somehwere) may want
> to fix such bugs at some point.

and yet nobody has ... it's a nice theory, but a couple years on and it's 
clear that aRts is not only EOL'd in the theory but very much so in practice. 
and that is OK.

there's a difference between using a product and us maintaining it upstream. if 
someone out there is using KDE1, for instance, that doesn't mean we work on it 
upstream.

usage != development, and it's important to be clear to people what our 
development situations are. we are not very good at clearly communicating the 
reality of our development situation and we pay for that in terms of 
downstream screw ups (*cough*Kubuntu LTS*cough*). we're getting a lot better 
at it thanks to the release team (so kudos to that effort!), but should be a 
lot more honest when it comes to things such as what components we actually do 
spend time on. aRts is not one of them.

one thing I discussed with Matt prior to him closing these aRts bugs is to 
ensure that they are closed with a dinstinct resolution status so we can 
easilly retrieve the reports closed as such. so that if by some stroke of 
chance someone appears who wants to work on aRts in a meaningful way, we can 
easily reinstate all the bugs that were closed en masse due to aRts being 
shelved.

> Leaving such bugs there and also open if they are still valid doesn't harm
> and could eventully help.

it does harm in the sense that we end up with a bugzilla that has an ever 
increasing number of bugs even though we've moved on (so it no longer reflects 
our actual progress, which in turn makes measuring harder and also affects 
morale). those increasing number of irrelevant reports (in terms of 
development, not user interest!) also means that when i do a search for open 
bugs with certain keywords (something i do on a regular basis in my use of 
bugs.kde.org) i get more and more useless hits.

> For one it helps a KDE 3 user who suffers from
> such a bug (and they are still lots of KDE 3 users) to see that it is known
> and still valid.

those bugs are still searchable. they aren't deleted from the system.

> KDE as a whole is very open. If someone steps up and says i want to fix old
> aRts  bugs for some reason let him do it and find those bugs.

.. which hasn't happened in 2 years. there's no point in stringing users along 
or making it more confusing for downstreams by providing the facade that aRts 
might still actually be maintained.

in short: imo, James fixing the bug == good; keeping aRts bugs open and 
floundering on bugs.kde.org == not useful and even negative in value.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software


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