[Scummvm-devel] Closing out old tickets in the tracker

[D G Turner]

Hi Matan,
  Sorry, but objection here!

  I do agree quite a lot of those tickets are quite old or have not
  had significant activity, but most can be reproduced / are still
  present.

  We do have quite a "long tail" of older issues which do eventually get
  investigated and fixed.

  The HTTPS update and RSS Feeds for Forums tickets which you just
  closed are two examples of that.

  I can only speak as someone who has been trying to close out some
  of the bugs recently and organise the remaining ones to allow engine
  developers and porters to find the relevant bugs if they want to work
  on them.

  Personally, I generally only close a ticket as outdated if the issue
  has been fixed in the meantime.

  Quite a lot of these are "original" bugs which occurred in the
  original interpreter i.e. script bugs and these can take quite a lot
  of time and energy to track down, thus long delay between initial
  report and fix. We used to move these kind of issues to the Engine
  TODO page on Wiki, but I tend to feel that has resulted in alot of
  detail and interim investigation into them being lost in the past,
  so would advise again doing that. I am marking all of these bugs
  with "original" keyword and generally unless they badly impact
  gameplay, reducing their priority to low.

  Several engines had games with very buggy scripts, especially the
  Gob engine, SCI and to a lesser extent Kyra and SAGA, hence these
  have disproportionately more minor bugs reported, and especially
  some which are very tricky to reproduce.

  We should however close bugs which lack information to allow
  reproduction of the bug, and to which the submitter is unresponsive
  as those are not likely to be resolvable in any other way than
  "Works For Me".

  We should also bear in mind that some bugs are open for longer
  periods as they are on rare games or variants i.e. FM-TOWNS,
  Touche, non-English translations, or in the case of Port specific
  bugs, lesser used platforms. These bugs may be open for some
  time before a developer with access to the game / hardware
  has the time and inclination to look at them.

  Overall, I would strongly recommend not closing bug _purely_ on
  the length of time they have been open.
Thanks,
David Turner

On 24/10/18 21:51, Matan Bareket wrote:
> Hi Team,
> 
> There are currently 574 active tickets in our trac. Out of those 574
> tickets:
> 
>    - 44 haven't been touched since 2010
>    - 73 haven't been touched since 2011
>    - 99 haven't been touched since 2012
>    - 132 haven't been touched since 2013
>    - 188 haven't been touched since 2014
>    - 217 haven't been touched since 2015
> 
> Basically, almost half of the tickets in our system are over two and a half
> years old without any activity. A lot of them have most likely been fixed
> in the few years.
> 
> Is there a certain amount of time for these old tickets that the team is
> comfortable to simply close as outdated?
> 
> Any objections to close out these tickets?