Re: Launchpad bug statuses

[Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Tom, there's a question for you in the first block)

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 09:14:34PM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> * "New (a.k.a. Nobody Has Looked At Me Yet)"
> 
> Bugs are sometime moved from Incomplete to New when the submitter has
> provided the required details but the submitter doesn't confirm the
> issue
> 
> * "Incomplete (Reporter, Give Us More Information!)"
> 
> The description doesn't mention the case where bugs are sent back to
> New. What should a triager do when the submitter replied but he still
> doesn't know if the bug should be confirmed? Shouldn't launchpad also
> automatically reopen Incomplete bugs when the submitter replies if those
> are going to be autoclosed?

Sebastian, you are a very smart man. I was planning on using this exact
example as a corner case in my next posting. The handling of Incomplete
when a person provides more information is at the moment vague; if the
person provides information, what should they do to the status?

There are a few problems here. First, if the person /does/ change the
status to New, then the bug is no longer Incomplete, and you can't use
the "Incomplete (with response)" report to pick it out (because it's
New, of course).

If the person doesn't change the status, it will show up in the
"Incomplete (with response)" report. Yay. But then, what happens if the
developer looks at the bug and then says "Can you also include a core
dump please"? He's probably not going to change the status to New and
then back to Incomplete, which means that the bug will still show up in
"Incomplete (with response)" report (since date_incomplete or whatever
won't be updated), and yet it doesn't have a response.

Now what? Sounds like we need a way of saying "I still need more
information". And a matching "I provided the information" would be a
nice touch too, since it would avoid the reporter feeling like he needed
to do something additional (such as change Status) when providing
information.

> * "Fix Committed (Please Test My Fix)"
> 
> The status is used by the some teams to mark bugs which have been fixed
> upstream since it makes easier to review bugs that have a patch to
> backport or should be closed when the next version is uploaded

I don't really like this use of the status, but I don't think it's at
the moment particularly harmful given Fix Committed has no special
semantics.

Ideally, there would be a way of indicating that a certain bugtask is
dependent (or waiting) on a special event; that would allow us a bit
more specificity in deciding what to do when that event happened. But
I'm not going to get into this battle right now -- it's an idea for the
future.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125