Re: [boost] Bug list status

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-12-30 22:50:13

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:12:45 -0800, Marshall Clow wrote

> >Hi Marshall -
> >
> >Thx for keeping this up.  I have a question, though.  I'm wondering if Mike
> >Glassford or Stephen Cleary (2 of the top 3) are really going to ever address
> >their bugs in the near future?  My guess is no.  Perhaps we should consider
> >closing some of these out as 'will not be fixed -- no active maintainer'?
> 
> Jeff -
> I think that closing these is the wrong thing to do.
> 
> Rather, we should find someone who is interested in maintaining 
> those libraries, or possibly, remove them from boost - since they 
> contain bugs and are no longer maintained. [ My 2c, obviously. ]

No disagreement, finding new maintainers that can help would be ideal -- but
it's a pretty infrequent event.  Part of my point (perhaps not obvious) is
that it's probably unfair for the originator to ever expect that these will be
fixed -- so maybe it's better to just tell them that?  
 
> >Taking it from another angle, by my count we have the following historical
> >breakdown:
> >
> >Opened in 2002 - 9
> >Opened in 2003 - 3
> >Opened in 2004 - 12
> >Opened in 2005 - 37
> >
> >Seems to me that the 24 issues that are now over a year old really should be
> >evaluated for validaty or closed as unlikely to ever be fixed.  Thoughts?
> 
> I agree that they should be evaluated for validity. I'll bet that a 
> lot of them have been fixed; since I started nagging people, many 
> bugs have been closed with "oh yeah - that was fixed in 1.32" type 
> comments. If they're still valid bugs, and are on supported 
> platforms, then they should be remain open until they are fixed.

I don't know if we can invent new states, but if we could it would be nice to
move some of these to open-no-maintainer.  The other question is -- does the
originator care, at this point, about a 3 year old unfixed bug?  If they
haven't gotten a fix by no it seems likely that they worked around it or moved on.

Just thinking out loud here on how to improve the process...

Jeff