Closing outdated bug reports, was Re: [Bug 284524] nspluginviewer crashed when encountered a swf file

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Bonjour Gérard,

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 12:42 AM, "Gérard Talbot"
<browserbugs at gtalbot.org> wrote:
>
>> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=284524
>>
>> Myriam Schweingruber <myriam at kde.org> changed:
>>
>>            What    |Removed                     |Added
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>              Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |RESOLVED
>>             Version|unspecified                 |4.4.5
>>          Resolution|---                         |INVALID
>>
>> --- Comment #3 from Myriam Schweingruber <myriam at kde.org> ---
>> Closing for lack of feedback. Feel free to reopen if you can reproduce
>> this
>> with Konqueror 4.8.4 or later and provide the necessary feedback.
>
>
>
> Myriam,
>
> I do not object to your decision; I agree with your decision.
>
> Retrospectively speaking, I think bugs.kde.org should create another
> Resolution field so that we could close a bug report for/due to lack of
> response. Mozilla.org and connect's IE beta feedback created a similar
> resolution field/option when bug reports were unconfirmable, unactionable
> and when the bug reporter did not reply to NEEDMOREINFO types of comments.
>
> Automated UNCONFIRMED resolution
> http://blog.gerv.net/2004/09/automated_uncon/

Cool, we already have a request for canned answers in b.k.o:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186800

The needed change in Bugzilla is apparently already done if I read the
above-mentioned blog post correctly, so nothing prevents us from
implementing it.

What needs to be done when we do such a change is to actually blog
about and explain why we do this. Some arguments we need to address:

- KDE projects are Free Software mostly developed on a voluntary
basis, and it is only natural that the individuals behind a project
change over time. While some remain, others leave due to Real Life
(e.g. Family, new job, change of interest, etc.)

- Due to the size of some projects with a large user base but small
developer team - as Linus puts it in one of his recent talks: "The
average number of developers in an Open Source project is 3" - it is
sometimes quite hard to keep track of bug reports over time,
especially since the version used in development can be sometimes well
ahead of what is shipped by distributions.

- We don't have the resources to maintain backports nor can we
maintain several stable branches for the same reason, so reports in
bugzilla that are outdated need to be close to avoid obfuscating of
still existing issues. It is the "needle in a haystack" paradigm after
all :)

- A bug report can be influenced by many factors: system
configuration, individual uses cases, etc. so not all bugs are equally
reproducible (could we stop using that horrible "reproduceable" term
that seems to only exist as a keyword on b.k.o, please?)

All these are some reasons that we should point out why it happens
that some old bug reports have never been addressed.

Regards, Myriam
-- 
Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community
Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE:
http://www.fsfe.org
Please don't send me proprietary file formats,
use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300)
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