On Monday 09 October 2006 07:53, Boyle Owen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Speaking as an apache user (not developer) who merely lurks on this
> list, is it appropriate for me to question the formatting (and hence
> usefulness) of this periodic report?
By all means. You've earned karma on the users@ list, but even if
you hadn't you'd be welcome to raise the issue. Bear in mind that
even if you don't program, you can make a really useful contribution
to our bugzilla by going through it and weeding out some of the
dross, to leave it with a better proportion of genuine bugs over noise.
Thanks for opening the debate!
> - Might the time-ordering be reversed to show the most recent, first? It
> seems a bit odd always to find, right at the top, this ancient bug about
> a CGI interpreter... Anything important is 739 bugs later. {I *know*
> that this probably means a major rehash of the code that generates the
> list and will not be simple as it sounds - then again, if it's built
> from a DB query, it might be as simple as replacing DESC with ASC..)
IMHO that's supremely unimportant. I just delete these messages
immediately, and use the online search facility when I find myself with
time to look at bugs.
> - Is the "Status" column *ever* updated? For example, is suexec bug
> #7862 from April 2002 really "New"? Did anyone ever fix it?
It's just a database result. Bear in mind that some old bugs really *should*
be fixed (e.g. bug 17629). But many others are left open for altogether
different reasons:
* They may be underspecified, so noone knows wtf they're about,
yet noone feels confident to close them.
* They may become irrelevant, but noone noticed.
* They may have a patch that's useful for some users but not appropriate
in general. Those are left open to make it easier to find the patches.
* They may be utterly bogus, yet the reporter just reopens them if we
close them.
> | Total 739 bugs
That's the bottom line of what makes a flat list like this useless, IMO.
--
Nick Kew
