[RFC] Close old versions for New Bug Reports?

Martin Gräßlin mgraesslin at kde.org
Sun Sep 2 19:47:12 UTC 2012


Hi all,

I just had a look at the versions of Plasma in bugs.kde.org and currently it 
is possible to open new bugs for old versions such as 4.5. Since the latest 
bugzilla release which is running on our servers it is possible to disable 
versions for new bug reports. This does not affect existing reports.

Restricting the number of available versions has several advantages:
* the list of versions presented is much smaller making it easier for users to 
select the correct version
* users clearly see that their version is outdated and it might not make sense 
to report that bug at all, e.g. if they want to report against 4.7.1 but only 
4.7.4 is available they should recognize that 4 > 1 and that this means that 
they should install a bugfix release
* it makes it more clear for triagers what is still maintained by the 
developers. If a bug gets nevertheless opened it is on "unspecified" and the 
triager knows that this version is no longer supported

At KWin we have the following schema implemented:
* Accept bugs for current stable and old stable (that is 4.9 and 4.8)
* Accept bugs only for the latest two minors of a version (that is 4.8.4,  
4.8.5, 4.9.0 and 4.9.1)

The rational behind that:
* once a .4 or .5 is released there will not be any further release on that 
branch
* distributions are mostly one stable release behind (e.g. OpenSUSE 12.2 to be 
released next week will ship 4.8 and not 4.9)
* distributions need some time till the latest minor hits their users
-> we kind of need to accept bugreports for old stable
-> supporting old old stable does not make any sense
-> we need to accept bugs for more than just the latest minor

If Plasma would like to follow this workflow established in KWin, I volunteer 
to close the old versions and will update after each release the versions (I 
currently already create the new versions for Plasma).

Kind Regards
Martin
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