Bugzilla administration policies

[James Hawkins]

On 10/10/05, Richard Cohen <richard at daijobu.co.uk> wrote:
> James Hawkins wrote:
> All of these
> > bugs need to be reopened (including 2858) and marked as blockers of
> > the meta-bug "IE6 fails to install".
>  >
> Reopening them is pointless, because most of them are so old that
> ie6setup does not fail in that way anymore. So they would be resolved as
> fixed until we're left with just one - "IE6 fails to install with the
> current release".
>

The point is you don't know if they're fixed or not.  We resolve these
bugs as we would any other bug.  We ask for feedback and if they don't
respond after a certain amount of time we resolve it abandoned.  They
aren't duplicates and we don't know whether they are fixed or not, so
those two resolutions are invalid.  Bug 1293 is a good example of a
bug that is still not fixed.  IE6 setup consistently fails to download
the setup files.  Keeping the bug open provides incentive and
information for someone to fix it.

>
> Metabugs are generally a bad idea because they are very hard to
> maintain. What is the point of "Get games working perfectly", and how
> can it ever be resolved?
>

Of course metabugs for really ambiguous topics like "Get games working
perfectly" is a bad idea.  The bug means nothing and could include
hundreds of bug reports.  "IE6 fails to install" is a specific problem
with wine that has at least 7 specific bugs causing the failure.  When
IE6 installs correctly without workarounds, then the bug has been
resolved.  Abuse of metabugs in the past shouldn't stop us from using
them now.

--
James Hawkins