[racket-dev] Responding to old bug reports

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Fri Dec 2 04:39:13 EST 2011

Yesterday, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> In my role as bug czar, I've been trying to work through the backlog
> of old unexamined bugs.  Unfortunately, many of them (a) have very
> little information and (b) are from a long time ago.  A good example
> is this one: http://bugs.racket-lang.org/query/?cmd=view&pr=9481
> 
> There are a few options here:
> 1. Close old (how old?) bugs that don't have enough information to
>    triage/reproduce.
> 2. Put them in the "feedback" state, with a general request for more
>    information.
> 3. Attempt to guess at what component this belongs to, and assign it
>    that way.
> 4. Leave it in the current state.
> 
> I think 3 and 4 are both unacceptable. I'm leaning toward 2.  The
> major drawback of 2 vs 1 is that we accumulate lots of bugs that
> nothing will ever happen with. The major drawback of 1 is that we're
> saying to someone who took the time to report a bug "we didn't care
> about this bug at the time, so now we're closing it".

I think that a sensible choice would be to combine #1 and #2: decide
that PRs that have been in feedback state for a while are retired.
It's easy to do this -- here's a query that shows all of these PRs
sorted by date of last modification:

http://bugs.racket-lang.org/query/?State=feedback;columns=Category;columns=Synopsis;columns=Last-Modified;sortby=Last-Modified;cmd=submit%20query

Looks like there are very few of them and most could be closed.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


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