On Mon, 28 Sept 2026 at 21:34, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development < [email protected]> wrote:
> I must say I'm not pleased at all with this process. From the > notifications I'm getting, a ton of widgets-related bugs are being > closed "simply" because they're old. With QtWidgets being "done" both in > Qt 5 and Qt 6, it's extremely likely that many these bugs are still > completely valid. We're just shoving the dust under the carpet, open bug > reports counter goes down, everybody happy? FWIW, I endorse everything Guiseppe said. I am bemused that so many people in our industry still conflate the age of a bug report with its validity (or lack thereof). Throughout my 30+ year career, I have had this argument with managers and developers more times than I can remember and, more often than not, my advice has fallen of deaf ears, leaving me to wonder why we always need to learn certain lessons the hard way. One of those times was in February 2011, when I was instructed to close all of Qt's open bugs that were older than six months. Despite my advice, management insisted on that course of action, and I reluctantly complied. Unwisely, I ran the script under my own Jira identity, so I was the primary target of the many users who were upset about their perfectly valid bug reports being summarily closed without any prior warning. Within a few minutes of launching the script, my Inbox began to receive a steady stream of messages, some of them quite abusive, and many clearly not realising that they were shooting the messenger rather than the decision-maker. Within 24 hours, I had received more than 400 messages. After forwarding a selection of these messages to my management, I was instructed to reopen all of those bugs. Some of the takeaways from that incident were: * Any mass-closure of bugs must be preceded by public announcements explaining what is intended to happen and why. * Any mass-closure should be executed under a dedicated admin account that directs correspondence to the decision-maker(s). * The assumption that bugs will be reported again if they're still valid is largely fallacious. Many of those people who emailed me said that they would not bother reporting their bugs again because they believed that we would probably just close them again in another six months. * The age of a bug report is not of itself a good justification for discarding it. Cheers, -- Jason
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