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Re: Mainline in regression-fix mode after Thanksgiving
On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:23:21AM -0800, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> It's not purely for me to say. Making it our policy to auto-assign
> regressions would be something of a societal change, and, as such,
> should only be done as part of a broader consensus.
> Personally, I think this is a reasonable thing to do, and I've in fact
> given the bugmasters explict permission to assign bugs to me if the
> regression comes from a patch I've committed. Assigning the regression,
> however, is only half the problem: the other problem is getting the
> assignee to actually fix the problem.
In a corporate environment, where programmers are paid to maintain code,
an assignment policy means that it is a particular person's job to fix a
bug, and that some penalty will be paid if that person does not do his/her
job. But we don't have that here; it's a volunteer environment. Under
such a circumstance, the only reasonable thing that assignment can mean in
the GCC project is that the assignee has agreed to work on a bug fix, and
anyone reading the PR can see that it is being worked on.
Under these circumstances, I don't think that the bugmasters should assign
bugs to people unless there is pre-existing agreement (for example,
Mark has agreed to accept bug assignments as described above). After
all, we have an alternative: if a patch causes regressions and this isn't
promptly fixed, the patch can be reverted.
I suggest cc-ing the patch submitter when a regression is traced to a
patch, and also suggest that people assign bugs to themselves if they plan
to work on a fix, to avoid duplication of work. That also means
"unassigning" the bug if other work intrudes, so someone else can pick up
the slack.