"Waiting for information" status in BTS
Hi, folks. Recently, I discovered something very annoying about the BTS.
One of my packages had a bug reported against it. I tried to reproduce
the problem and failed. About two hours after the bug first appeared in
my inbox, I replied to the submitter saying that I couldn't reproduce the
problem, and asked the submitter to try a very simple change to see if
that would isolate the problem. (It's #40456 if anyone wants to look at
it, but the exact bug is not relevent to this discussion.) Well, the
submitter hasn't responded back to me, and now I have a package with a bug
that I don't have a hope of fixing.
I can't close the bug, because it's not properly addressed. I can't in
good conscience just ignore the bug, because it's been reported and I have
to assume it's real. So, what on earth am I supposed to do? It's yet
another bug in the BTS that can't be fixed, one more bug that's bloating
the number of non-wishlist bugs. Though we're not concerned about
marketing and appearance, having close to 7 000 non-wishlist bugs really
does make us look bad.
Currently, it's possible to mark a bug "forwarded". As far as the
maintainer is concerned, the bug is to be fixed elsewhere; in other words,
it might as well not exist as far as his responsibilities go. How about
marking a bug as "waiting for more information"? This would indicate to
the BTS that the maintainer can't do anything at the moment to fix the
bug. The bug shouldn't count, as no action is currently possible. It
would exist in the BTS because it is a bug, and because the submitter
should send further information there -- so nothing is lost from the way
things are done now -- but with it we can keep a more informed eye on the
number of real outstanding bugs in Debian.
Thoughts?
--
William Ono <wmono@debian.org> PGP key: 0x93BA6AFD
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