On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 08:05:50AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: >... > So in short I agree with Holger: it really depends. It's rude to ask > someone to do a bunch of work when you have no intention of following > through on that work, which happens a lot when new volunteers do bug > triage without the skills required to follow up on the responses to that > triage. But also if you're never going to work on a bug and you don't > think it serves any documentation purpose, it's okay to close it as > wontfix and arguably better communication to the bug reporter than leaving > it open and creating the illusion that you might fix it some day.
A maintainer closing a bug based on its contents is quite different from "close bugs simply because they are old". There is a certain stupidity if a (human or nonhuman) bot blindly asks the submitter whether the "typo in the manpage" bug is still reproducible, or closes it simply because it is old. How a maintainer deals with "systemd: Please port to Hurd" kind of bugs is a different topic. >... > The more prominent the > package and the larger the unsophisticated user base, the more aggressive > you have to be about closing bugs if you want the open bug list to be a > useful artifact for guiding development. >... I would say the typical Debian approach in such situations tends to be to optionally look at older bugs once when you adopt a package or join the packaging team, and afterwards only react to bug email. > Or one can just use an autoclose bot, I guess, which is basically the > equivalent of one of those email autoreplies that says "this mailbox is > unattended and no one will ever read your email." :) And, to be honest, > if that's the reality of the situation, maybe better to know than not! I am sometimes getting an email from the BTS that this "typo in the manpage" bug I reported 20 years ago has just been fixed in the "New maintainer" upload of a package. When working on orphaned packages or doing NMUs, it is also often useful for me to see the amount/age/contents of bugs in a package as an indication in what state it is. cu Adrian