Re: Launchpad bug statuses

(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.

This is a challenging use case. As you mentioned elsewhere, it's not obvious how to design a reasonable UI for this.

Two things we could do:

* Add a 'still-incomplete' button which sets `date_incomplete` to now. You'll have to posses a pretty good understanding of the workflow to know when to use that, though (we can guard against people extending the expiry period by only displaying it if there has been a response, but still).

* Make the incomplete statuses primitive, but transition automagically from `Incomplete (without response)` to `Incomplete (with response)` when a user submits a new comment to a bug that was previously marked `Incomplete (without response)`.

I think I like the second solution better.

What do you think?

Tom