Re: Unanswered Emacs Problem Reports 40+ Months

[Christian Bryant <christian@gnulinuxlibre.org>]

On 10/24/2013 12:46 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> 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?

That was my initial intent, yes.

> 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.

Absolutely agreed.  I will be asking the reporter to confirm the problem
continues to exist in the latest release.  Is there a concern some users
may simply close bugs without testing?

>> 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.

For 40 month old bugs and younger, I would absolutely agree.  However,
due to the age of the bugs I will be emailing reporters a form email on,
I think it may be the best route to get some clean-up on those 68 months
to 41 months old bugs.

> 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...

I would say "no" on bankruptcy, certainly.  Perhaps the form email is
the better of two evils?

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

Perhaps this discussion will get some folks thinking along those lines!
:-)

- CB