Shortly after we released Launchpad 1.1.9 (on 21 September), Launchpad's housekeeping system - the Launchpad Janitor - expired 2,862 Incomplete bugs. We estimate that around 900 of these bugs should not have been expired. We're sorry for the confusion and inconvenience that this caused. We will restore the "Incomplete" status of all bugs that the Launchpad Janitor expired. This process will begin at 12.00 UTC on 10th October. What went wrong =============== The feedback that you've given us has highlighted three flaws in the bug expiration process we used: 1. We expired duplicate bugs: this went against our policy that duplicate bugs should not be modified, nor should they generate email. 2. We expired bugs that were still being triaged: recent comment activity showed that these bugs had not been abandoned but our process didn't take account of that. 3. We expired bugs that were confirmed or fixed in another location: once a bug is confirmed in one location, it should not be incomplete in another. Bug contacts are responsible for managing a bug's many statuses once it is confirmed in one location. Understanding Launchpad's bug statuses ====================================== While we were reviewing these issues, we discovered that many people are using the Incomplete status to mean something other than "this report cannot be confirmed to be a bug, additional information is needed". The comments and activity of roughly 20% of the Incomplete reports suggest that Confirmed or Wont Fix would have been a more appropriate status. In light of this, we've written a blog post looking at how and when to use the various bug statuses that Launchpad offers: http://news.launchpad.net/general/of-bugs-and-statuses How we're going to fix this =========================== Now that we know that many people have used the Incomplete status to mean a number of different things, we are going to restore the Incomplete status of all bugs that the Launchpad Janitor changed. During this process: * Comments left by the Janitor will be removed from those bugs that have their status restored. * The updates will not generate email. * We won't alter the status of any bug if its status has been manually altered since the expiration. We still believe that our original intention -- to remove abandoned bugs from bug queues -- will be a useful enhancement to Launchpad. We're going to fix the three flaws in the expiration process and then email selected projects' bug contacts with a list of the bugs that we have identified as abandoned. With your feedback, we will refine this process. We will only resume the expiry process when the Launchpad user community is happy with the way we identify abandoned bugs. We will also update the Launchpad documentation to ensure it explains the bug statuses more thoroughly and we will make that documentation easier to find. Thank you for your ongoing feedback and for helping us to refine this process. -- Matthew Revell launchpad.net mrevell in #launchpad on Freenode
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