I made this request privately before, apparently without success, so I'm
repeating it publically in hopes that others on the team will support it.

I'd like our procedures modified to eliminate any updates to the bug
database that don't add value.  In particular, I'd like to see the "this
wasn't fixed in release 0.xx" updates stopped.

There are two primary reasons for this:

1. The noise that they add to the database make it impossible run useful
queries like "show me the bugs that haven't been updated in the last year"
or "show me the bugs that were updated the longest time ago."

2. These updates are basically taunting our bug report reporters.  They hear
little or no human feedback on their bug reports, but then every 6-18 months
we send them automated email saying "Just wanted to let you that we ignored
your problem AGAIN."  This leads to bugs like issue 664 which has been open
for 4 1/2 years, has never been acknowledged or updated by a human, but has
had *6* automated updates posted to it.  That particular issue was raised by
a former developer, but there are equivalent situations for external users
as well.

If we were to make a goal of, for example, acknowledging bug reports within
60 days and providing users with updates at least once every two years,
there'd be no way we could use our tools to support that goal (see #1).
(BTW, I'd like to set the bar much higher, but we currently don't even meet
this loose standard.)

Finding known problems in a given release can be done with a simple query
and doesn't require modifying the database at all.  On the other hand, given
our current practices, there's no way to find bugs that we've ignored for
long periods of time other than brute force manual browsing individual open
bug reports.

It's too late for this release, but I'd like this to be the last release
that this is done for.

Tom

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