"Gardening" old bugreports

[Nicolas Fella]

Hi,

Am 19.01.23 um 04:04 schrieb Justin:
> Hi Nicolas,
>
> This has been discussed with Nate Graham directly who has approved
> this cleanup of Bugzilla including the messaging behind it.

KDE consists of more than Nate tough. We discuss and "review" things in
the open.

>
> I am happy to discuss any concerns that people have around this. I
> understand Krita requested we exclude them from any gardening and that
> has been done, however this is the only feedback I have received.
>
> The gardening team aims to find out if the bug reports are still
> relevant by involving the users who reported them in determining if
> they are still valid. This increases community involvement and helps
> KDE as there isn't anywhere near enough manpower to review the
> thousands upon thousands of bugs that haven't been touched in years.

Anecdotally many people don't like such automated changes being done to
their bugreports that don't actually engage with the content of the report.

>
> The bugs that we are interacting with are ones that have not had any
> activity for over 2 years. We are simply trying to reinvigorate
> discussion on those bugs to see if they are still valid. If the user
> does not reply within the standard 30 day period after a bug is set to
> NEEDSINFO, it is automatically closed by the Bug Janitor.
>
> I am not simply closing bugs, so I do take offense that care is not
> applied.

Properly "triaging" old reports requires at least some level of
understanding of the project, codebase etc. I'm afraid there is no
simple solution to that and rule-based approaches aren't good enough.
Even taking things like CONFIRMED status or wishlist priority into
account assumes that these have actually been consistently applied.

>
> I will halt it until it is approved by more developers. However if it
> is decided that it isn't wanted then the KDE as a whole will need to
> entice more people in sorting old bugs individually as it is clearly
> not a priority right now for the majority.
>
> Regards,
>
> Justin
>
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the initiative of cleaning up bugs.
But we do need to handle this with a lot of care to avoid it backfiring.

Cheers

Nico


> On 19/1/23 11:05, Nicolas Fella wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> can we please put the effort of "gardening" old bugreports on hold until
>> we figured out whether this is actually something we want to do? Several
>> people already expressed concerns about this.
>>
>> Improperly applied such mass changes can do more harm than good. We may
>> close bugreports that are actually still useful just because nobody
>> replied on then in a relatively short timeframe.
>>
>> Properly cleaning up old bugreports is important. However, it requires
>> some level of care and expertise to judge whether a bugreport is still
>> useful. Judging by the volume of bugreports that is pinged with the same
>> copy&paste message this care is not  applied here.
>>
>> At minimum such initiatives should be announced and discussed before
>> doing them, to allow people to give their input on the proposal. I am
>> not aware of any such announcement/discussion.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Nicolas
>>