Hi Cliff,

I was the person the person that closed this bug today. I was going
through the ticket today in preparation for an anticipated TG 1.1
release and in the process tried to clear out some (!) of the really old
tickets, that nobody had looked after apparently for years.

I can understand your consternation that I decided that the problem was
based on a user error. "user error" is actually probably the wrong term,
I just wanted to convey that the problem can be solved with the correct
application configuration. That this was not the case when the bug was
reported is unfortunate, but I wasn't even really involved in TG 3 years
ago.

The experience of wading through all this old and obviously
forgotten/neglected ticket certainly made it clear to me as well that
something is amiss with our ticket handling procedures and I was
thinking of writing my thoughts/suggestions on this topic to the mailing
list soon anyway. What strikes me as odd is that you use the moment
somebody is actually starting to do something about it and handles your
ticket to condemn our practice.

We still encourage user to enter bugs into the trac but we also
encourage them (and we always did), to discuss problems on the mailing
list. Also, the more information somebody provides for a bug report or
patch, the more likely it is, that it will be looked after in timely
fashion. I also closed about a dozen of tickets today, where the devs
asked the reporter for more information, because the ticket had neither
a proper problem description, information about how to reproduce the
problem or any example code, and there had been no feedback for months
or even years. I don't think it is useless to enter tickets into trac,
the problem seems more that there are so many useless tickets. Which is
our own fault: we should have more quality control and immediate
feedback for these.

One other problem is, I think, that most of the tickets at the moment
don't get assigned to anybody by default, so nobody will be notified. A
related problem is that the general ticket-notification Google group
stopped working a year ago. Incidentally, just today I wrote to the
group-owners to ask them if anything could be done about it.

What we need, IMHO, is a ticket manager, who's sole job is to distribute
tickets and look after them, i.e. see that they:

1) have a proper problem description and if not
2) get feedback from the reporter
3) get assigned to the right developer
4) they get addressed in some way* in a timely fashion by checking
tickets periodically and nagging the one they are assigned to.
5) get closed when they are done, are invalid, won't fix or do not get
feedback after some time.

* by either fixing the problem or asking for feedback or giving and ETA
or rejecting the ticket.

Fact is, that we got ourselves into this mess with dozens (hundreds?) of
 open and often outdated tickets and we now need to find a way to handle
this so that the ticket system becomes a really useful development tool
again. This may also mean closing most of the old tickets
indiscriminately, even if this will turn off some more people like you.

Chris


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