Re: Unanswered Emacs Problem Reports 40+ Months

[Christian Bryant <christian@gnulinuxlibre.org>]

On 10/25/2013 11:47 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> I imagine most responses will be of two kinds:
>
> 1) No reply. Then what?

Considering the bugs I will start with are the oldest there,
"no reply" to these bugs will simply produce a note in the
bug that a request for an update was made.  Better than
nothing, I think.

> 2) A slightly annoyed "yes, of course my wishlist/doc bug/whatever"
> still applies, didn't you read it/test it/try my patch?".
>
> The useful replies I expect to be a small minority ("It was fixed in
> 24.1", "I misunderstood and this is not actually a bug", etc.)

I will shoot a handy report every 50-100 bugs over to Stefan
with those who answered with a slightly annoyed "yes".  Taking
those in chunks and having new Emacs team members whittle them
down is both useful for them to better learn Emacs, and to
users who will see that bug maintenance does eventually happen.

> So I expect the result will be mostly be to annoy the bug reporters

I'm open to recommendations for the least annoying verbiage :-)

> I'm not optimistic that an automatic process can tell us much, but I
> guess we'll see.

I've performed tasks like this many times at work, for the same
reasons:  I saw a report where a specific application or library
not only dominated the bug report, but had the oldest bugs, too.
Maybe a year from now, or two or three years from now, some other
application can take that honor.

Cheers!

- CB