Tomáš Pospíšek's Notizblock

Won't contribute to or fight 'too old; closing' robots

tldr; if you have robots that are closing tickets then I propose to state that prominently on your ticket submission page, so people reporting bugs or submitting patches can decide up front if they are willing to spend their time on it.

Some open source projects have begun using robots that close bug reports or tickets that are "too old".

If your project does this then there is a good chance that I will not spend my time writing a bugreport or contribute to tickets.

Let me justify my stance:

To me reporting a bug/opening a ticket has multiple purposes:

• to get the problem fixed

  • by the author of the software
  • or by somebody else that passes by that ticket and happens to have fixed the problem for herself or knows how to fix the problem etc.

• to document the problem

  • so that others can find it and discover, that they are not crazy, but the software is
  • so that people can document workarounds
  • so that people can collect additional important information about the problem
  • so that people can report alternatives
  • for collective research on and resolution of the problem

In my perspective, a bug that gets closed, gets obscured: it becomes less visible.

That's good if the problem has been fixed. Then the information won't be taking up attention unnecessarily.

However it's bad if the ticket gets closed if it hasn't been fixed yet, because it looses visibility and therefore a lot of the reasons for having a ticket in the first place - as listed above - get less attention.

The consequence of letting a robot close valid, old tickets will sometimes be that people will re-report the problem, not find the work-arounds, and so forth.

So in my perspective using robots to close old, valid reports is wasting (other) people's time.

I am not interested in having my time wasted, so I proabably won't write or contribute tickets if your project uses robots to close tickets.

Context/History:

• for these reasons I stopped reporting bugs in Ubuntu a long time ago
• there are now robots re-opening tickets that were closed by other robots. What a waste of energy and therefore display of contempt for our environment.
• a perspective from the other side
• don't get me wrong: I appreciate people publishing their open source work a lot. Huge thanks!

Tomáš Pospíšek, 2020-10-08