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"No Feedback" in bug tracker

php.internals

Tim Starling

19 years ago
A suggestion: allow anyone to reopen bugs marked "no feedback". Also allow anyone to switch a bug from "feedback" to "open". The PHP bug tracker could go a long way towards liberalisation. Community involvement seems to be actively discouraged. I'd like to see some more sweeping changes. But I'd be content with this small change for the time being. A common scenario is this: * Someone reports a bug * An admin couldn't be bothered to reproduce it themselves, so they slap a "use CVS snapshot" template on it, hoping it will go away * Sometimes the reporter will install a snapshot and confirm the bug, but more often, they couldn't be bothered. Sometimes other people watching the bug will immediately reproduce it with the snapshot and report their findings, but that doesn't stopped the bug being closed "no feedback". Sometimes someone will find the bug and reproduce it months later, but there is no procedure in place to have the bug reopened. There aren't even any relevant contact details available to draw the attention of admins to the bug that needs reopening. So my suggestion is to allow the community in general to review the "no feedback" designation. -- Tim Starling

David Zülke

19 years ago
+1 David Am 23.07.2007 um 17:43 schrieb Tim Starling:

Antony Dovgal

19 years ago
On 23.07.2007 19:43, Tim Starling wrote:
> There aren't even any relevant contact details > available to draw the attention of admins to the bug that needs reopening.
This is simply not true. Every time someone changes status of the report (even with the canned reply) the system logs his email. For example: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=42027 If you want to reopen a report, just contact the person who asked for feedback OR leave a comment in the report, that helps in 99% cases too.
-- Wbr, Antony Dovgal

Jani Taskinen

19 years ago
On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 16:43 +0100, Tim Starling wrote:
> A suggestion: allow anyone to reopen bugs marked "no feedback". Also > allow anyone to switch a bug from "feedback" to "open".
You're free to add comments to those. Do that and send an email to the person who requested feedback. There will be no "freedom" for anyone to go and reopen bugs, we had that once and it didn't work. Some changes to the tracker are under construction, I will get back to this issue as well. --Jani

Richard Lynch

19 years ago
On Mon, July 23, 2007 10:43 am, Tim Starling wrote:
> A suggestion: allow anyone to reopen bugs marked "no feedback". Also > allow anyone to switch a bug from "feedback" to "open".
I believe this idea has a great deal of merit, unless it has proven to be subject to abuse in the past or something. Conditional +1 fwiw :-)
> * An admin couldn't be bothered to reproduce it themselves, so they
I suspect that this is a gross over-simplification... Many reports I see that end up as "no feedback" don't have enough info that I think anybody could reproduce it.
> Sometimes other people watching the bug will immediately reproduce it > with the snapshot and report their findings,
If you have specific examples of reproducible bugs that aren't marked bogus, I'm sure somebody would love to take a look at them and fix them. It's the irreproducible ones that nobody wants to deal with :-) If they're marked bogus, it often means user-misunderstanding, which sometimes is multiple users misunderstanding which... Well, that's kinda how come it gets marked bogus, eh?...
> but that doesn't stopped > the bug being closed "no feedback". Sometimes someone will find the > bug > and reproduce it months later, but there is no procedure in place to > have the bug reopened. There aren't even any relevant contact details > available to draw the attention of admins to the bug that needs > reopening.
Short Term Solution: Write a NEW better bug report, complete with a simple reproduce case, clearly demonstrating the bug, and provide a link back to the old bug in the bug body, requesting that any bug fix also get posted to the old bug as well. I've had very very very good results with this in the past. I have also been guilty of submitting bad bug reports due to my inability to actually conjure up a good report, figuring a bad bug report is better than no report at all. Well, sometimes anyway :-) Let's face it: Debugging is hard work. :-) It's hard to generate a good bug report, and even harder to make sense of or do something useful with a bad/incomplete bug report.
-- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So?

Stanislav Malyshev

19 years ago
>> A suggestion: allow anyone to reopen bugs marked "no feedback". Also >> allow anyone to switch a bug from "feedback" to "open". > > I believe this idea has a great deal of merit, unless it has proven to > be subject to abuse in the past or something.
I agree with "no feedback", but not necessarily with "feedback" to "open" since it might lead to a mess in case when we really need to track if feedback was already sent.
-- Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com