Re: NEW vs. UNCONFIRMED

[Dara Hazeghi <dhazeghi at yahoo dot com>]

--- Wolfgang Bangerth <bangerth@ices.utexas.edu> wrote:
> I think I left out something: I wouldn't have closed the report if I
> didn't get feedback, or if it wasn't sufficient. I would just have 
left
> the PR open.

Yes, that makes more sense. I think the general policy should be that 
bugs get closed only when there's good evidence that they've been 
fixed, and lack of feedback, save under very special circumstances, 
doesn't fall in that category (the special circumstances being for 
example, that a patch for the particular problem was installed, but 
nobody has he configuration in question, and no feedback is obtainable 
from anybody who does).

>
> We're presently having a problem with PRs in WAITING: you guys have 
been
> putting lots of PRs into WAITING, for which I have the feeling that
> there's already enough info in the PR. We shouldn't be closing these
> reports if we don't get feedback in 3 months. We
> should review each of  them again then.

I agree that we shouldn't close bugs willy-nilly. But I think the vast 
majority of bugs in feedback really should be in feedback. Looking at 
the two biggest categories in feedback, we've got bootstrap and target, 
and both of those are the type which generally require a fair bit of 
information...

> That sound reasonable for bugs on obscure targets.

Good.

> For example? For C/C++/Optimization, we do not put PRs into NEW just
> because it "looks like this could indeed happen". I would be very much
> opposed if we would adopt this as sufficient.

No, but what I mean is that C/C++ bugs are _generally_ reproducible 
across targets, meaning you don't need a specific machine to test them 
(usually). I certainly hope I haven't been marking bugs as NEW for 
those reasons :-)

> Basically:
>   Wolfgang   x86-linux only
>   Volker     same
>   Christian  sparc
>   Giovanni   windows stuff
>   Falk       alpha (and some more)
>   Dara       seems like everything else :-)

Not quite. Right now I have access to PowerPC/Darwin, x86/Linux, 
Sparc/Solaris. Hopefully this summer: HPPA/HPUX, IA64/HPUX, and 
IA64/Linux.

Looks like the main missing ones are MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/Tru64 and the 
small embedded ones (SH, Arm, etc.).
>
> > Another question I have is about including the platform of a bug in 
the
> > summary (ie "[powerpc64] blah fails doing foo". Now that Daniel has
> > made it possible to edit the host and target fields (thanks 
again!), it
> > seems to me that we should be using those, rather than the bug 
summary,
>
> I'm not yet won over -- PR submitters will fill in these fields for 
front
> end bugs as well, and then searching will become more difficult again.
> Also, what if a bug exists on multiple targets?

Good point. I concede that in this case the information is useful. I 
withdraw that suggestion.

> I do it with a few people who I know are usually responsive to my
> requests. Otherwise only if I contacted them on- or off-list. I 
consider
> it as impolite just assigning a bug to someone without asking 
beforehand.
>
> I think this is a question for the maintainers to answer.

Right. I guess that pretty much answers all my questions. Now back to 
finding out what's going on with Ada on Darwin...

Dara

P.S. Could somebody take a look at 10922 sometime? I definitely should 
have taken a C++ course earlier this year, but until then...

P.P.S. Also, my message to the list about cygwin doesn't seem to have 
gotten any response. My question was basically: is building with MS 
VC++ supported (IMHO no), and if not, should we document this in the 
target specific installation instructions.