Hi,

I am cleaning up the Bugfix-Archive a little, so that we actually have a
chance to look at the stuff that's there.

While doing this I had an idea, and it would be interesting to know
if this would be of some value.

Up to now we just stuff all bugs into the archive, and there it
is kept until the case is either [closed] or [approved]. Closing
can happen due to a lot of different causes (rejected, allready
included, superseded, not for the image, and so on).

Nevertheless we have acumulated a *huge* backlog of Fixes and
Enhancements that nobody has looked at till now. 

I would like to have a clearly defined strategy how to handle
this. And my Idea would be that *every* item, regardless of how
cool or important it is, gets closed after 6 Months "automatically".
This actually don't need to be really automatic: Just if a harvester 
happens to see a an old item in BFAV he either harvests it or just 
sends a [closed] message. 

The idea is that *really* important changes will be re-submitted by
someone (the author, a user, just someone who cares about it). The
re-submitted fix will have to be tested and adjusted for the latest
development-image. 

So this scheme will habe a lot of good effects:

1) remove clutter from the Archive
2) We have a third way to decide about changes: "yes" "no" and
   "nobody cares, thus: no".
3) The image is a moving target. Especially refactorings tend
   to change lots of methods, and old fixes rot. This way we
   make sure that we only have to harvest changes that are
   reasonably old.
4) Maybe this will help to bring some urgency into harvesting
   "I need to get this in or it will be lost". 

Any negative effects? 

    Marcus


-- 
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeak.de