That need to close bugs?

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 07:13:44PM +0200, Markus Hitter wrote:
> Each bug filed contains a snippet of information, at least "something  
> doesn't work here". Each bug closed because of incompleteness says "I  
> ignore your work" to the filing person. Unless you redefine "closed"  
> from "problem solved" to "no interest in working on the problem", of  
> course.
> 
> As for the solution - missing resources are a pretty bad excuse to  
> throw away user's contributions. There is no way but to sort the mess  
> and perhaps to refine the search tools.

In practice, while true, I don't think this is a useful interpretation.
I've spent a long time working on and looking at massive bug trackers
such as Mozilla and GNOME, and here's my position on this topic:

    - Software will always contain bugs; bugs reported are more an
      indication of which bugs are affecting our most dedicated users.

    - The most important bugs should get fixed.

    - If a bug is important, for a population as big as Ubuntu users, it
      will affect more than one bug reporter.

    - Unclear or otherwise poor bug reports that stay open forever
      clutter listings, distract triagers and developers, confuse
      reporters and give the sense of a poorly managed bug tracker.

If you add in limited resources to the above there's a strong argument
to focus on bugs which have been clearly described and close the
Incomplete bugs automatically.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3376 0125