[conspire] Bugs are not like fruit.

[Nick Moffitt]

Rick Moen:
> I gather, from Luis's account, that had he closed as
> irrelevant/obsolete a number of Jamie's GNOME 1.4 bugs on grounds that
> newer GNOME releases by then existed, glossing over the fact that
> (according to Jamie) many of those bug reports had been open and
> ignored for multiple years.

I very much enjoy Colin Watson's observations on this trend in dealing
with old bugs.  For some reason I think of this essay as the "Bugs are
not fruit!" post:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/2009/03/02
> There is a good way to expire bugs like this, of course. It goes
> something like this: "I've read through your bug and tried to
> reproduce it with a current release, but I'm afraid I can't do so. Are
> you still experiencing it? If not, then I think it might have been
> fixed by [this change I found in the package's history that seems to
> be related]." You can't do this en masse, but you'll get a much better
> response from submitters, you'll learn more doing it, and in the
> process of doing the necessary investigation of each bug you'll find
> that there are many cases you don't have to ask about at all.

Some of this essay is a reaction to subtle changes in the "launchpad
janitor" processes from late 2008 and early 2009.

-- 
On my TV show, when I say "and where do we put policy?"
the audience will yell "USERSPACE!"  -- Sean Q. Neakums