Re: Unanswered Emacs Problem Reports 40+ Months

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Christian Bryant wrote:

> I'll be embarking on a contact effort over the next month to query
> problem reports for Emacs from oldest on up as to whether the bug is
> still relevant, and if not, request that reporters please close the
> report. If the bug _is_ still relevant, I'll ask them to update the
> bug report. This effort will apply to bugs older than 40 months,
> starting with the oldest reports, as noted in recent tracker data [1].

Thanks. We certainly need help with bug reports.

I'm not exactly sure what you are proposing to do, though.
Would this be a totally automatic process, in which every old, open bug
report simply gets a mail asking the OP to confirm it is still relevant?
Because I'm not sure that is a very useful thing to do. I don't like it
when eg certain distributions automatically close all bugs filed against
previous releases unless people confirm they still exist in the latest
release.

> I'll make no initial attempt to cross-reference bugs for duplication,
> fixes in later releases, or other troubleshooting efforts.

See, I kind of think this is the thing that _should_ be done first (I've
tried to do it in the past). Once someone has filed a bug, the burden is
on us as developers to do something about it. Whether that's requesting
more info, fixing it, saying we won't fix it, saying it's not a bug, or
saying that it's not a priority right now.

I don't really know what's going to happen with all the old Emacs bugs
that are still open. It seems impossible to ever fix them all.
But does that mean we should just declare bankruptcy and close them?
I don't know...

If every person with commit access to Emacs dealt with 15 bugs,
that would be all of them. ;)

Sometimes I look through the old ones and see if I can do anything about
them. I do think this requires actually reading them, though, not simply
sending a form email.