"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

> Put it this way, in a business, any programmer who suggested ignoring
> old bug reports (without evidence that they were not still relevant)
> would be invited to consider a career in gardening, to put it politely.
_I_ wouldn't put it politely. :-)

Old bug reports are important. Old bugs need to get looked at and dealt
with, which might even mean rejecting them but it ought not be done
automagically.

Perhaps the hardest part of a bug archive system (in my tediously long
experience of them) is finding a way to connect related reports. Using
email-like threading is an excellent start but we really need to filter
them through a context sensitive AI engine to correlate with older
reports. Actually, we ought to do that with the entire mailing list so
that threading is done properly.

I'll leave implementing such an engine as an exercise to the reader
with the whispered thought that a bayesianfilter might do a good job
here. If they can filter junk, they can surely filter gold from dross.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Doesn't have the brain power to toast a crouton.