Marcus Denker <marcus at ira.uka.de> wrote:
> The squeak community currently ignores *every* bugreport. Just if someone
> happens to have some time on his hand just at the exact moment someone files
> the report something happens. I would estimate that a bug-report that is
> not fixed within 48h is forgotten.

This shouldfn't be true if we really have a "bug archive viewer".  It's
certainly very far from true for Debian packages.  Some of them have
staggering numbers of bug, but the old ones still don't get forgotten.

Granted, even large Debian packages tend to have less in them than
Squeak as a whole....


> 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.

Whether there is AI or not, there should be a mechanism for combining
and detaching individual posts to a bug log.  If the AI gets it wrong,
we will want a chance to correct it.  Further, even without an AI, we
can get along fairly well by just having a way to combine them.

All it takes is two new message types: "merge" and "split".  Merge has
two arguments, and split has just one.  The polite thing to do after a
split, would be to note which thread corresponds to which part of the
bug report.

I guess there could be "unmerge", as well.

-Lex