On 12/4/2013 2:30 PM, Lawrence Mandel wrote:
I think David, Nick, Henri, and you are right - there are lots of old bugs that we each think are important enough to fix. (Yes, I have some as well.) In my mind the real question is, given all of the work that we all have to do, are we going to spend the time to fix these bugs? If not, as a reporter would you prefer to see your bug go untouched for an indeterminate amount of time or would you prefer to see an acknowledgement that your bug will not be fixed at which point you can either shrug your shoulders or make a stronger case for why the bug should be fixed?
WONTFIX resolutions presently mean something extremely strong: if someone were to propose a patch to fix the bug, it would be rejected, even if it otherwise satisfied code quality constraints. There are notable instances of this condition where the resolution was made, even over vocal opposition (the Restore MNG bug is the most infamous example; the Hashcash spam bug is a more recent example). Changing this to mean "we don't have realistic time to fix this" dilutes the message that WONTFIX sends when it's really needed.
Quite frankly, closing valid, actionable old bugs (I make this distinction, because there are old reports where the information provided is useless for attempting to understand what's wrong) sends a wrong message to contributors. It also makes it harder for eager contributors to find bugs to work on--many of the first bugs I worked on *were* the 10 year-old bugs that no one was fixing.
-- Joshua Cranmer Thunderbird and DXR developer Source code archæologist _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
