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

Fri Oct 26 10:53:12 CEST 2018

Hiya,

For what it’s worth I tend to agree with most of the arguments regarding keeping tickets open especially around open time being a poor criteria on its own.

I have in the past used something like your idea of an ‘abandoned’ status (used to call it ‘hibernating’ in another project) to show things that are not clearly fixed but are still open issues. You could also use that status to drive burndown on the  tickets without ultimately changing any of the metrics or visibility as it is would still be an open status, just one we could optionally filter out.

Also very easy to move back to a more active status without any open/closed/open/copy/paste/urggg type mess. We could tell users to always search over hibernating tickets as well when raising an issue. In my mind it seems like the pragmatic compromise if we really want to clean things up but not lose or bury items. 

This is of course, based on the status quo with tickets being untenable, I can’t really comment on that as I am A: useless as a dev, and B: much more passively involved these days. 

It comes down to people actively using the tracker and committing at the end of the day that should have the call on this so just my 2p ;). Also worth noting I come from the point of view that something is never ‘closed’ unless you can prove it.

Regards,

John

From: Scummvm-devel <scummvm-devel-bounces at lists.scummvm.org> On Behalf Of Matan Bareket
Sent: 25 October 2018 22:35
To: bluegr at gmail.com
Cc: scummvm-devel at lists.scummvm.org
Subject: Re: [Scummvm-devel] Closing out old tickets in the tracker

I'd like to address some of the feedback.

There are several type of tickets currently in our tracker:

1.	New, actively worked on tickets relevant to 2.0.0
2.	Tickets that are old and unresolved. 
3.	Tickets that are old, and have been either been fixed unintentionally or were not closed when fixed.
4.	Tickets that are bugs in the original interpreter.

Regardless of the reason why they're still open, they are by all means abandoned by the reporter, the maintainer and the community as a whole without any activity (or interest) in them. A lot of these tickets aren't assigned to anyone, nor does anyone but the original reporter expressed any interest in seeing them fixed. Engine bugs are particularly tricky since the might not have access to a particular game, or the engine lacks a maintainer.

Maybe closing these off doesn't sit well with the team, and I agree with some of the arguments on to why keep them open. Maybe the alternative is to create a new ticket state "Abandoned" so they can be separated from active tickets. At a minimum we need a better way to organize tickets and make sure that open tickets are relevant. There are other fields that we don't use within Trac including Version tags, Milestones and any number of custom fields (We could probably at least track whether a bug was reproduced or not, rather than closing as "worksforme".

I'm open to suggestions 

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 4:58 PM Filippos Karapetis <bluegr at gmail.com <mailto:bluegr at gmail.com> > wrote:

Hello

Please don't look at the tickets as mere numbers. A lot of them concern bugs that are still present, however they are of lower priority. Closing them will mean that some other user will reopen them at some point.

What we could do is close the bugs which are also present in the original interpreters, and keep links to them as known issues via the corresponding game/engine page in the wiki. We have done as such with a lot of bugs in the past. This could reduce the overall number of bugs, without losing any bugs which are only present in ScummVM.

Regards

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 11:52 PM Matan Bareket <mataniko at gmail.com> 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?

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