New subject: [Bug 30763] Please turn autoclose on in bugzilla

24 May 2012


      http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30763
Bug #: 30763
           Summary: Please turn autoclose on in bugzilla
           Product: Wine
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: other
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: -unknown
        AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org
        ReportedBy: butraxz@gmail.com
    Classification: Unclassified
I propose turning autoclose on in bugzilla.
The reason is, that I have now gone experimentally thru about 300 old bugs, not
touched for 600-900 days. I have got around 15 saying yes, the bug is still
relevant to them, around 15 saying theirs can be abandoned, a few that have
been reported as fixed but not closed in time and the rest, around 260 bugs got
no answer. Which means propably that those are abandoned too.
Wine Bugzilla now has over 7000 open bugs from which over 4000 of which have
not been touched for a year and about 700 for two or more years. Based on the
findings above, I believe there would only be 10-15% bugs relevant today and
all others are abandoned. The work of manually closing bugs imho no longer
works in practice and I will stop it now as I believe I am able to draw the
conclusions.
Every day 2-5 new bugs are logged, 0-4 closed and about 10 new gets more than
600 days old. This means that in practice Bugzilla grows larger and larger and
searching what is relevant becomes harder and harder. I believe that the
current manual bugzilla closing practice can no longer bring relevant state of
wine to contributors.
In 2-3 years technology advances with great pace and interest in what wine can
do changes too. Programs get born and die. Programs famous six months ago may
no longer be famous today, for example most games are short to play and
short-lived in these days. HW is updated and interests change. In 6 months wine
gets 12 new releases and if I log a bug and no-one wants to touch it for six
months, it is most likely a zombie.
I have found in practice, that when I ask whether a person could update the
status of a zombie bug that they have created, some people just neglet it and
some get hostile of it being touched without me first testing whether it is
still relevant, althought I they themselves have not bothered to update their
own bugs for 2-3 years.
I feel that the open bug situation in bugzilla has got out of hands.
Therefore I propose turning autoclose on in bugzilla for bugs with no activity
for 6 monts. There are multiple of implementations of autoclose in
bugzilla.org, so this is not a technical issue.
The text could be on the lines :
'This bug has been automatically closed by bugzilla as abandoned because it has
had no activity for 6 months. OP or Administrator can reopen this bug after
retesting with latest version of wine and supplying up to date information
about the status of this bug'.
Nothing would be lost, bugs would only get closed and could be manually
reopened as often as OP or admin feels like it. Wine project itself says that
it provides only the APIs that are relevant to running the currently popular
set of programs.
It does not support old programs forever, dos is being phased out, windows 9x
is given minimal effort, win8 with winRT is coming etc. If all zombies would be
closed, could the relevant ones be immediately seen. Autoclose is also neutral
job unlike a person closing it. I feel that up to date bugs are much more
relevant to wine than faster and faster cumulating number of thousands upon
thousands bugs in unknown state.
Sorry that I am not able to do more, just giving this as my five cents worth…
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[Bug 30763] New: Please turn autoclose on in bugzilla