[Mapserver-dev] Bug status needs attention

[Daniel Morissette]

Sean Gillies wrote:
> 
> Like I said in another thread, it's difficult to query Bugzilla
> because we developers, overall, are not paying attention to
> the status of bugs.  Bugs tend to go a long time in a "New"
> state, and then are fixed and closed, or just go on indefinitely
> in a new state.
> 
> If we acted quickly, say within a week, to change a bug's status
> to "Accepted" or "Unconfirmed", it would be possible to query
> Bugzilla for a list of MapServer's known and confirmed bugs.
> Such a list could be a big help to users, IMO.
> 
> Easy for me to say, because I'm the owner of a relatively minor
> component that doesn't get as much action, but what do you think?
> A few minutes a week could make Bugzilla a more useful diagnostic
> tool.
> 

I agree that we could try to make better use of bugzilla, but 
unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as marking all bugs accepted 
or unconfirmed. To me, accepting a bug means that you are working on it, 
but in real life we do not always have time to act on all bugs (hence 
the longlist of open bugs). So are we better with a bunch of "new" bugs 
or a bunch of "accpeted" bugs that are not being taken care of?

I would tend to think that it's better to leave a bug in NEW state if we 
don't have time to act on it, this way it's still clearly up for grabs 
if another developer with the right skills/knowledge combination wants 
to fix it.

What I've been doing personally is setting the "target milestone" to 4.4 
on bugs that I want to get back to before 4.4. That's how I would query 
for important bugs for 4.4, any of my bugs that doesn't have its target 
milestone set is either not going to make it in any specific release, or 
simply hasn't been classed yet. Perhaps we could create a "later" target 
milestone to be used for bugs that are likely valid, but that we don't 
know when we'll be able to act on them. This way we could use the target 
milestone for querying open bugs.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts... if I had a good solution in 
mind I would have proposed it already.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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