On Fri, 2011-09-02 at 13:54 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hum, I didn't realize our resolutions were so customized, I thought they were the upstream ones; this is what I've been told when discussing custom resolutions in the past. It's certainly something you could propose as an enhancement by filing a bug against Bugzilla, then.
OK, I will do that and post the link here. Any assessment of difficulty provided by the Bugzilla team can inform a decision between 2a and 2b.
2b. Co-opt an existing little-used custom resolution, e.g., CANTFIX (semantically questionable on its face, but maybe reasonable in light of the explanation on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html#status ).
As noted at the top of that page, that is the policy for RHEL, not for Fedora. Fedora policy is https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow#CLOSED . It states only "The resolutions CANTFIX, WONTFIX, and WORKSFORME are for use by maintainers only, and are self-explanatory."
You are right. But taking a step back, the project has the power to change the policy to best meet its needs. My point stands that the resolution is little-used (less than 2% [1]), and its use for expired bugs would harmonize with the current RHEL policy. None of my 131 bugs have been marked CANTFIX [2]; maintainers seem to find that the better-known WONTFIX and NOTABUG cover the range of cases.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/report.cgi?x_axis_field=version&y_axis_field...) [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/report.cgi?x_axis_field=version&y_axis_field...
- Do not change the bug state, and have maintainers apply the same
conditions now used by the bug zapper on all of their searches. Reducing mutable state is generally good in that it reduces the possible ways for things to get out of whack. But then it takes more work to see whether a non-CLOSED bug is expired. 3a. Like #3, but make it easier with a virtual EXPIRED resolution. Probably an undesirable level of customization to Bugzilla. 4. Add an "Expired" keyword or custom field, use it, and: 4a. Continue to close the bugs WONTFIX. Ugh, but I can use the keyword/field in search and maybe even get it to show as a column on search results. 4b. Do not change the status, and have maintainers use the keyword/field in their search.
I think if we're going to change this, the only sensible change is to use a different CLOSED resolution. All the others seem like hacks which are likely to cause more trouble/confusion than they resolve.
Fair assessment.
We clearly want to bugs to be CLOSED, not open with a quasi-closed keyword or whiteboard field.
I'm not sure who "we" is, but I disagree. The generally accepted definition of CLOSED is that the resolution is final unless subsequent events invalidate the original rationale. (C.f. the RHEL policy: "The bug is considered dead, the resolution is correct.") All it takes for an expired bug to be reopened is for someone to have enough interest to retest it in a maintained Fedora version. To claim that this meets the definition of CLOSED is a big stretch. I believe that "expired" should properly be its own major state alongside "open" and "closed", but we have alternatives that are less radical and still solve the immediate problem with search.