On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 02:53:28AM +0200, Felix Dietrich wrote:
> Looking through bugs in the Mnemosyne package I noticed a couple of
> old and stale reports that could have already been closed.
This is an endemic problem in Debian: there are far, far too many bug
reports and not enough people working on them. This is one area that
people can really make a difference in contributing to Debian.
Having said that: be aware that, for some packages, triaging bugs is
possibly not the best use of time. For example, a package which is not
likely to remain in Debian (or, in someone's estimation, should be
removed), effort might be better spent on the removal, or packaging
an alternative, or figuring out a migration strategy for users from
the old package to an alternative.
> What is the etiquette dealing with seemingly forgotten bug reports?
> Should I send an email to the maintainer that asks him to have another
> look at the report and decide for an appropriate action; may I close the
> report myself or set e.g. the "wontfix" tag; something else?
If you are unambiguously sure that the packaged version of the software
no longer has that bug, then you can close it yourself. Note that if it
is fixed upstream, you still need to be sure that it is fixed in Debian
too: sometimes Debian packages deviate a lot from upstream wtih patches
which means it might not be clear.
When closing, annote the bug with found/fixed version information.
If you are using the bts command-line helper, you could do
(for the ficftional bug number ABCDEF, which was found in a version
2016.15-4, and fixed in a version 2017.4-1):
bts found ABCDEF 2016.15-4 , fixed it 2017.4-1 , done it 2017.4-1
At the end of the day, if the maintainer disagrees, they can reopen the
bug.
Thank you for wanting to make Debian better!
--
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⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://jmtd.net
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