Closing the flood gates on implicit bug subscriptions

[Jordan Mantha]

Hi all,

Tom Berger asked me to write the list about a little problem I'm having 
with bug contact subscriptions for bugs with a large number of tasks.

First of all, to give people an idea of what I'm talking about you can 
have a look at some bugs [0-2]. Notice how many tasks, comments, and 
implicit subscribers ("Also Notified" in the Subscribers portlet).

The problem essentially is that there are a lot of people getting 
bugmail for these "metabugs" and it's causing problems. People want to 
be able to opt-out of these bugs. The are often just process bugs where 
developers are tracking progress of mass packaging changes rather than 
actual code bugs that most bug contacts would be interested in.

Another problem is we tend to get bugs with a lot of "Invalid" tasks, 
either by mistake when reporting or as the bug develops. See for 
instance, [3].

There are three bugs in Launchpad right now that I feel address these 
issues:

1) https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/204980 - Allow implicit subscribers 
to explicitly unsubscribe. This would basically solve all the problems 
I'm seeing, however I can imagine Launchpad developers may not want to 
do this.

2) https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/83488 - Implicitly unsubscribe 
implicit subscribers when their bug task is marked Invalid (and I would 
add Fix Released). This allows bug contacts to get all relevant emails 
without flooding them once the task is finished.

3) https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1342 - Allowing somebody (admin, 
developers, etc.) to delete tasks. This would take care of the problem 
of people inadvertently adding an incorrect task or if we find that the 
task isn't needed. This is a generally useful feature for lowering the 
amount of non-relevant bugmail Launchpad-wide.


So, the question is, do people feel there is a need to change the way 
bugmail for these large "metabugs" are handled? Do Launchpad developers 
think they can make reasonable changes? I'm particularly interested in 
if people think solutions 1, 2, or 3 above would be useful to them. How 
critical is this issue?

-Jordan

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/204895/
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/201962/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/199014/
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/202817/