Now that 10.04 has reached end of life...

[Hans Joachim Desserud]

Hans Joachim Desserud:
>> As we all know, Ubuntu 10.04 reached end of life at the end of last
>> month. Right before this happened I looked over the bug reports
>> affecting this release I am subscribed to check whether they were
>> still reproducible on later releases.

Alberto Salvia Novella:
> Not worth the effort. If the bug is really important, someone will 
> confirm it when using the operating system or performing manual 
> testing.

> It's much faster to test if a software works than confirming all the 
> unconfirmed reports.

Hmm, well, they might be reported or show up in some cases. These were 
mainly straight-forward reproducible bugs though. I reckon most 
developers will be looking for bugs affecting the current development 
release. Which means they might miss out on issues which were reported 
earlier and haven't been updated the last couple of releases. Of course 
it might be argued that these are low priority since few people are 
complaining and/or they concern edge cases. However, the bugs are still 
present and reproducible, it's just at a glance unclear whether that 
still remains the case x releases later. So my part is updating them to 
reflect that they are still present.

Hans Joachim Desserud:
>> Since it no longer exists in Ubuntu, I doubt these issues will be
>> fixed, unless they are addressed upstream or repackaged in Ubuntu.
>> Which is a bit sad, but I that also means they are padding out the
>> list of open bugs, making it harder to find actual issues.

> Non necessarily. Although it would be good to remove those old bugs, 
> you can just filter releases using tags.

Sure, that gives you a more updated image of the current situation. But 
there might be bugs reported in the past which are still present.


> On the other hand, I proposed a long time ago that a bot should clean 
> those by asking the user for confirmation while setting the report 
> status to "incomplete".

It's tricky problem. On the one hand, I'm tempted to agree, because 
there's various older reports around affecting versions which are no 
longer available. On the other side though, the bugs might still be 
there even though people haven't commented in a year or two, because all 
the necessary information is already contained in the bug report.

---
mvh / best regards
Hans Joachim Desserud
http://desserud.org