Fwd: closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 11:02 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> Till Maas said the following on 01/08/2008 07:36 AM Pacific Time:
> > On Sun January 6 2008, Jon Stanley wrote:
> >> On Jan 6, 2008 12:39 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> >>> Is there a preference on which version number(s) should be used if a
> >>> problem exists in more than one version? Is it documented somewhere?
> >> One bug == one problem with one version.  Use the clone feature of
> >> Bugzilla (IMO, we need to solidify this at FUDcon - adding to my list
> >> at [1].  Anyone should feel free to edit this.
> > 
> > Imho having a bug cloned up to four times is too obfuscating / unclear, but 
> > having another mechanism to track for which releases a bug is there would be 
> > nice, e.g. additional flags:
> 
> You mean "fixed in rawhide" doesn't help? ;-)
Yes, because it means "bug unfixed"/"bug present" in releases < rawhide,
comprising "current".

It lets maintainers believe to have fixed something (which they actually
did "Fedora upstream"), while getting away with ignoring a bug for
releases < rawhide.

In many cases, it causes maintainers to believe to have fixed something,
while they actually didn't fix it, and to forget about it over time.

Worse, from a user's POV, FIXEDRAWHIDE lets appear maintainers as
"negligent/ignorant/arrogant" and Fedora as "poorly maintained/second
class distro", which is pushing around users when they actually are
affected by a bug.

If I were to decide, I'd abandon "FIXEDRAWHIDE".

Ralf