[Bugsquad] [Kde-pim] Reminder: BugDays for Kmail on 18/19 and 25/26 August - please join the fun!

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Saturday 18 August 2012 11:18:30 laurent Montel wrote:
> Heu... Myriam
> I don't understand why you close all kmail1 as unmaintained ?
> 
> I thought that you will look at if it's reproductable on kmail2 and migrate
> to kmail2 or close it.
> 
> But close all kmail1 bug is a very  bad idea
speaking as a heavy bugzilla user with a clean database I have to disagree on 
this point.

In my humble opinion just closing all KMail1 bugs is the only possible and 
sane option at hand. Let's just face the facts: there are 1190 open KMail1 
bugs and an additional 692 open KMail 2 bugs. This is all without counting the 
wishlists items.

Now I think I can provide some insights in what that actually means. With KWin 
we have gone through a transition which is in some regards similar to what 
KMail has gone through. The KWin today is a completely different application 
than the KWin in 2007. Our max of open bugs (+wishes) had been around 800 open 
bugs and now we are down to around 200 open bugs and wishes I don't count 
because they are in a state that I can use it to track my own work.

So we see the numbers are a little bit lower than what we face for KMail. My 
experience is that it takes one hour to triage bugs so that we have ten bugs 
less. The more bugs the longer it takes to triage. Another experience is that 
the older the bug the more difficult it is to confirm whether it is still 
valid or not. In that regard KWin and KMail1 are very similar. To my knowledge 
now with KMail2 KWin is the oldest still in development application of the KDE 
application suite.

A crashreport for an old version is completely worthless. The code fragments 
don't match any more, it is impossible to say whether the crash is still 
reproducable or not. The only possible chance is to ask the user whether it is 
still valid. But this is actually an insult to the user. Uhh we haven't cared 
about this for three years so now could you please tell us whether it still 
applies (oldest crash report for KMail is from 2005, last modified in 2007). 
Again I have gone through that and closed bugs and wishes which started with 
"Imported into bugs.kde.org".

The state the KWin bugtracker was in, meant that it was not usable for fixing 
bugs. If I had half an hour to work on bugs, I spend half an hour to find a 
bug which could be fixed. Now if I think about the state of KMail bugtracker I 
cannot imagine how that can be of any help. Now after the cleanup I have 
searches giving me bugs I could instantly start to work on. No time wasted.

>From my experience users are just fine with closing the old bugs. You cannot 
imagine how often I got a "oh I completely forgot about that issue". Also 
users like it if you are as honest as possible. If you tell them that the 
bugtracker is a mess, they understand it.

So my personal advice is to close all KMail 1 bugs with a nice and explaining 
message and asking the users to report a new bug if the issue still applies 
for KMail 2 as of 4.9.0. Something in the area of:

"Thank you for reporting this issue. We are very sorry that this issue could 
not be resolved untill now. In the meantime the development switched from 
KMail 1 to KMail 2. The transition to KMail 2 fixed many long standing issues 
we experienced with KMail 2. The changes are so large that it is not easy to 
verify whether a bug is still valid or not. Unfortunately over the time the 
amount of bugs accumulated to more than 1000 open bug reports. Because of that 
we close all bug reports as unmaintained. We are very sorry that we do not 
have the time to look at each bug individually to verify whether it has been 
fixed or is still valid for KMail 2.

We kindly ask you to give a try to our latest version 4.9.0 released on August 
1st and give a try whether the issue you reported is still valid for KMail 2. 
In case it is still valid we kindly ask you to report a new issue against 
KMail 2.

Thank you for your understanding and thank you for your help in improving the 
quality of KDE Software."

Please use your available time and that of the volunteers in the best possible 
way. Go through the already huge list of KMail 2 bugs and clean that up. I 
have been shown yesterday an issue reported agains KMail 2 were a user 
experienced data loss monthes ago and nobody replied to the report yet. It is 
very difficult to argument that KDE developers care about the users if one is 
shown something like that. Please work on what matters and thanks for taking 
care of KMail :-)

Kind Regards
Martin Gräßlin
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