Re: 4K Bugs

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Lars Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:
>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

[…]

 >> Closing bug reports tends to annoy their reporters.

        Not only the reporters; if I’m supportive of a change requested,
        closing the respective report will hardly make me any happier –
        irrespective of who made the request.

 > It does, but only because they think "closed" means that the report
 > is disappeared, and "moreinfo" means that we're still thinking about
 > it.  Both of which are wrong.  :-)

        Semantically, “closed” means that there’s no bug (any more) –
        that is, the recipe given by the reporter does not reproduce the
        issue, or the reporter is found to be mistaken on the feature’s
        intended (and documented) behavior.  In the latter case, it may
        still make sense to review, and possibly amend, the
        documentation, so to reduce the chance of the intended behavior
        being confused for a “bug” in the future.  (Hence, a “mistaken”
        bug report may point at an actual bug in the documentation.)

        When the bug explicitly requests for the change of the behavior,
        being “closed” means that either the change was implemented,
        or a similar feature was provided, or that the assumptions the
        request’s based upon are no longer relevant (say, when the
        feature request explicitly concerns some facility that was
        removed from Emacs altogether.)

        Then, “moreinfo” means that the report lacks information
        essential to reproducing the issue (that is: its recipe is
        incomplete or missing); while “wontfix” means that the
        maintainer does not consider rectifying the issue (say,
        implementing the feature request) to be worth the effort.

        Technically, closed bugs are archived, which mean that they
        disappear from the “default” http://debbugs.gnu.org/ lists, and
        also become “immutable” – unless explicitly unarchived later.

[…]

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