Re: Suggestion for a new GNATS policy

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Sun, 11 May 2003, Volker Reichelt wrote:

> There has been some effort over the last year to clean up GCC's bug database.
> One problem is that many bug reports have to be revisited several times
> (which is just a waste of resources), because of two problems:

I suggest working out what changes to the GCC Bugzilla configuration would 
be helpful in this regard, so that they can be made before the transition, 
especially if they might affect the conversion program (converting the 
described notations used in GNATS into an appropriate form for Bugzilla).

I believe (but <http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/> presently gives an error 
message) that "open" is converted to UNCONFIRMED and "analyzed" to NEW or 
ASSIGNED.  Usefully different types of confirmed bugs could get different 
states in Bugzilla if that is useful.

Date on which a bug was last verified could be a new Bugzilla field.
"monitored" would probably be a keyword (and regression information
control the choice of milestones for bugs).

> +synopsis line. Some reports have a stamp "<strong>[monitored]</strong>"
> +instead of a date stamp in the synopsis line. This means that the PR is
> +checked automatically (currently against the 3.3 branch and mainline almost
> +daily by a program run by Volker Reichelt). These reports do not have to be
> +rechecked manually.</dd>

I'll reiterate that if we put these testcases in the testsuite, XFAILed
and with cross-references from testcase to bug number and from bug to
testcase, they would be automatically tested by many people on many
platforms and an accidental fix would be noticed immediately as an XPASS
when the patch accidentally fixing the bug is tested.  In that case the
keyword "monitored" could be used to mean "there is an XFAILed testcase in
the testsuite for this bug, and it isn't specific to a rarely tested
platform".

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk