Re: Migrating to the gitlab issue tracker

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Sun, Nov 08, 2020 at 11:58:28AM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Nov 2020 at 09:01, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> > I agree with Daniel. Please let's not clog the new bug tracker right from
> > the start with hundreds of bugs - that only makes it harder to focus on the
> > tickets that are really important. Let's use the migration instead to start
> > as clean as possible again.
> 
> I really don't like doing this kind of thing. It basically
> tells bug reporters "we don't care about your reports".
> We ought to at least triage them. Certainly for arm a
> lot of the reports in LP are real bug reports which we
> shouldn't just drop on the floor.

Mostly it is just a reflection of the reality we find ourselves in where
we have more bug reports than we have willing maintainer time to investigate
and resolve. Regardless of whether the bug are open or closed, there are a
large number we clearly don't consider important, otherwise someone would
have already looked at them.

This isn't a comment on whether the bugs are valid or not, just on whether
the bugs look important/critical enough to be worth spending time on, and
unfortunately most come up short.

If we accept this, then I think bulk closing old bugs is a good solution.
It makes it clear to users sooner than the problem they face is unlikely
to be ever resolved, and so they can stop waiting in vain for something
that will never happen and focus on working around the problem they hit.

We will certainly close many valid bugs in doing this. Some of those may
in fact turn out to be things we will fix, or want to fix but that's OK.
We can still fix them even if the bug is closed. Or if we notice a bug
being closed that's important, we can re-open it.

IMHO on balance it is still better if we blindly auto-close the 261
expired bugs in Thomas' dashboard, and then manually re-open perhaps
15-20 that might have been valid, than to manually triage all 261 bugs.

This will leave more time to spend on the masses of other non-stale bugs
which are more likely to be useful to our current users.

Regards,
Daniel
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