Re: Suggestion for a new GNATS policy

[Wolfgang Bangerth <bangerth at ices dot utexas dot edu>]

About the reconfirmed thing:
- Basically, "reconfirmed" is a list of dates of snapshots.
- I'd say everybody agrees that a good approximation to this is a list of 
  dates at which it was reconfirmed: we may use snapshots that are a 
  couple of days old, but not more. So let's make it simpler and take the
  date/time of reconfirmation, since bugzilla can determine that by 
  itself.
- Just as much, nobody really cares about previous dates, so it would be
  ok to just store the last time something was reconfirmed

Why a separate field (and why we store it in the symposis at present):
- it needs to be visible (see below why); the audit trail is not, at least
  not in queries
- reconfirming should be simple; bumping a date was considered simpler 
  than sending an email
- by point 3 above, nobody cares about previous reconfirmations, so we'd 
  like not to clutter the audit trails with pages of reconfirmations.

Given the last point, I would very much dislike reconfirming a bug by 
clearing-resetting the flag, since that would add _two_ more (and above 
that: useless) entries to the audit trail.

My optimal solution would be a button "Reconfirmed" that I could click,
that bumps the date of a respective (queryable) field, and that otherwise
leaves no mark in what I will usually see when I look at the audit trail.


> Developers only care the bug is still valid, remember.

That's too simple, Dan. We are talking about different communities, and 
the community that spends the most time with GNATS/bugzilla are what you 
termed bugmasters. I tend to think they do valuable work and it would be 
unfair to neglect their needs. The "reconfirmed date" information is 
clearly important to them (otherwise we wouldn't go to such length to put 
it into the synposis of _every single_ C++ report), so please don't make 
it harder than necessary.

W.

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Wolfgang Bangerth              email:            bangerth@ices.utexas.edu
                               www: http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~bangerth/