Hi,
[See my comments inline]
Quim: Thanks for the wonderful analogy and bringing this up again.
The question boils down to:
How and why do people use RESOLVED LATER?
The same topic was discussed one year ago in http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-November/056583.html and other projects had similar problems with RESOLVED LATER, e.g. see http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t83053.html Upstream Bugzilla developers removed RESOLVED LATER for Bugzilla ⪖3.0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13534
On Nov 6, 2012, at 12:02 AM, Nabil Maynard nadreck@gmail.com wrote:
That said, it IS easy for LATER to become a procrastination paradise, where it gets resolved and then never thought of again. Would it be worthwhile to set up an automated notice when a LATER bug ages past a certain date (say, a month without being touched), instead of axing the resolution?
One posting from last year's thread also stated "Currently the LATER acts as a blackhole and there is no structured process to re-evaluate these kind of bugs." (If importing from the compressed archives wasn't broken I could even tell you who wrote that.)
On Tue, 2012-11-06 at 02:24 +0100, Krinkle wrote:
We have the following indications that should be used instead:
- blockers / dependencies
- status ASSIGNED
- keyword upstream
- priority low or lowest
- severity minor
- or, resolved-wontfix if that is the case.
Using LATER in any of these cases only causes the bug to be lost end omitted from searches and lists.
I don't think it depends on the project, it depends on the user making the query not knowing how to utilise the above factors.
If one wants to generate a list to work off of that doesn't contain any of these, exclude them in the search parameters as desired. Don't stamp LATER on the bugs to make it fit the lazy search that only omits "RESOLVED/**".
+1.
My interpretation of potential meanings from the top of my head: * Meaning of "priority = lowest" (and potentially "Target Milestone = Mysterious Future" if TMs were really used). Using this obviously would not remove the report from being listed in the search results for open tickets, and I assume that people are lazy to run more complicated searches in Bugzilla to exclude those. Or rephrase this to "Bugzilla makes it hard to run useful queries" if you think that you're not lazy, but that it's the technology's fault. * Meaning of "RESOLVED WONTFIX". But as that sounds harsh the original reporter could disagree and start discussing, and discussing takes time the WONTFIXer would like to avoid spending. Social problem that requires explaining well why WONTFIX was set. * Meaning of "depends on UPSTREAM". We won't fix it ourselves but wait for an upstream fix. We won't backport the upstream fix but wait until we upgrade servers to an entire new Ubuntu version which provides a newer package that includes the fix. The Mer project uses "RESOLVED WAITING_FOR_UPSTREAM" for this.
If I miss meanings, please provide them.
Currently I'm in favor of killing RESOLVED LATER (which requires retriaging these tickets) and introducing a RESOLVED WAITING_FOR_UPSTREAM status for the latter case.
andre