Whenever we approach a release we always face the question: Which of our open issues are blockers for the upcoming release? Obviously as we approach 1.8, anything with a target milestone of 1.8.0 is (supposedly) a blocker. But what about all the issues with the '---' target milestone? Very old issues (e.g. something filed in say 2007) are almost certainly not blockers, whereas more recently filed issues may be.
Unfortunately we currently have 131 issues with a target milestone of '---', though given the age of many of these I'm fairly confident they are *not* blockers for 1.8 as they have already seen one or more releases pass by. Recall how we claim to use the target milestone: [[[ When an issue is first filed, it automatically goes in the "---" target milestone, which indicates that the issue has not yet been processed. A developer will examine it and maybe talk to other developers, then estimate the bug's severity, the effort required to fix it, and schedule it in a numbered milestone, for example 1.1. (Or they may put it the unscheduled or nonblocking milestone, if they consider it tolerable for all currently planned releases.) An issue filed in unscheduled might still get fixed soon, if some committer decides they want it done. Putting it in unscheduled merely means it hasn't been scheduled for any particular release yet. The nonblocking milestone, on the other hand, means that we do not anticipate ever scheduling the issue for a particular release. This also does not mean the issue will never be fixed; it merely means that we don't plan to block any release on it. ]]] In the interests of sanity I propose we bulk assign all issues filed before some arbitrary point in time to the 'unscheduled' milestone. I suggest using the date 1.7.0 was tagged as that point, under the assumption that any issues filed prior were not considered 1.7.0 blockers, so shouldn't be considered 1.8.0 blockers either. That would leave 24 "newer" issues which I'm happy to review and assign an initial milestone to. Thoughts? -- Paul T. Burba CollabNet, Inc. -- www.collab.net -- Enterprise Cloud Development Skype: ptburba
