Sun, 09 Jan 2011

Does Your Bug Tracker Do This For You?


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While working on a fast moving Open Source project, we sometimes get some platform specific bug reports. And even if nobody explicitly works on the problem, sometimes they go away due to general improvements of robustness.

So sometimes an intrepid volunteer goes through the list of old bugs, and asks the reporter if these platform specific bugs still persist. Quite often, we don't get a reply. Then the reports aren't very useful to us, and should be closed. Which requires a second pass through the bug queue. With more than 600 open bugs this quite a bit of work.

So I'd like to have an option to automatically close a bug within a given time span (say, four weeks or two months) if no feedback occurs. Our bug tracker (or at least our installation) doesn't have such a button.

Does your favorite bug tracker have it? Would you also sometimes like such a button?

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Allan Wind wrote


While I might be open to retest defects that I reported against newer releases. After doing this a few times and still not seeing it fixed it would get annoying. If bug tracker than closes the a defect while I was away on vacation or something, that would likely be the last time I report a defect. I would also start looking around for alternatives if available. Just figured you would want a end-user view.

What about making it easy to supply automated tests that demonstrate the problem? Do people supply fake emails to avoid spam?

Jason wrote


Reading this I had the same thought as Allan -- What if users could submit a snip of code in perl5/perl6/shell/whatever, that emits TAP, and whoever's on triage duty can proof and enable automatically running the test case?

I realize many reporters won't be bothered to add the test cases, but the ones that do and go through the effort can also have the satisfaction that their ticket will be automatically closed with the next build w/o much developer effort.

Moritz wrote


Just to clarify, we do try to reproduce bugs before contacting the reporter. But if we can't reproduce something, we have to rely on the reporter's response.

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