[Python-Dev] Goodbye (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Thu Sep 23 19:22:14 CEST 2010

On 9/23/2010 3:18 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

I personally think that the tracker fields and how they should be set is of minor importance.

As of just now, if you were to wonder "What (security) bugs are open for 2.5" and search on open 2.5 issues, you would get a list of 44 issues. It is only 44 instead of hundreds because of the work I and Mark have done in the last 4 months. It it 44 instead of perhaps 5 because Tarek and Eric insist on marking all disutils2 issues for all versions even though though these issues have nothing to do with maintenance releases. It is a real nuisance when trying to do tracker cleanup.

Trying to do searches in databases with inaccurate key data is a pain.

If there is a bug in Python, the most useful contribution is to submit a fix (or provide a rationale why this is not a bug).

Agreed,at least abstractly, with applying a fix a close second. That does not mean that other activities are useless.

However, there are currently 1034 issues with the patch keyword set and perhaps others with pacthes. So I think one can legitimately ask whether adding more new patches, to possibly sit unreviewed for years, is the most useful contribution at the moment.

In any case, asking whether a patch submitted for 2.5 (and now 2.6) is relevant to future maintenance releases amounts to suggesting that is may not be a bug for current purposes. Certainly, anyone fixing a bug for 2.7 should also know whether or not it is also a 3.x bug.

Asking every now and then "is this still an issue", or setting the version number, doesn't really advance the issue.

Numerous issues have been advanced by the questions I and Mark have asked. Some were legitimately closed as out of date (the bug reported for 2.4/5/6 had already been fixed). Others were closed as fixed when someone committed something. The fact that Mark got over-zealous in closing issues too soon does not negate this. Some of our questions were more specific, and asking questions was not the only things we did. I tested some old reports against 3.1 and I believe Mark also did some testing himself.

Setting Versions properly helps anyone searching for issues relevant to a particular version. If having a field set properly does not matter, then is should not be there. Are you suggesting that Versions be deleted?

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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