"No Feedback" in bug tracker View as Markdown

+1

David

Am 23.07.2007 um 17:43 schrieb Tim Starling:

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

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

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

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?