Bugs, and how to deal with them.

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 14 May 2003 07:57, Nathan Murphy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to figure out what the official policy on
> triaging bugs in KDE should be and I was planning on
> starting with Konqueror.  Can/should I close any bugs
> that have been filed pre KDE 3.0 without a follow up,
> or duplicate bug report?
Not if the bug is still reproduceable, or if there is no way
to ensure whether it's reproduceable (e.g. it only happens on
specific hardware etc.).

> Second, if an issue exists and is commonly 
> duplicatable, bug reports should again be filed
> regarding the problem and so closing bug reports
> without resolution does not present a long term or
> permanent problem.
This isn't very nice to the user who reported the bug. Put
yourself in the shoes of the bug reporter, who gets told
"I'm closing your bug report, but maybe you're right after all;
doesn't matter, others will report your bug again".
A bit of a strange reasoning :)

Closing a bug report before the bug is fixed can piss someone off.
But feel free to close the unreproduceable bugs, where it is obvious
that the bug has been fixed (and not that the bug is environment-dependent).
There are surely lots of those in the konqueror buglist.

What you can do to help even more is to create testcases out of
bugs that are still valid. E.g. reducing the HTML code or JS code of
the site, to the shortest piece of HTML/JS that demonstrates the bug.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by TrollTech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
Qtella users - stability patches at http://blackie.dk/~dfaure/qtella.html