Seems to me we could have the same effect with less work by having a
"time window filter" in the BFAV that shows only the last years posts.
That would make it easy both to do the regular harvesting/reviewing, but
also to go fishing for oldies.

What would change in essence is only that we'd be saying that the
harvester generally look only at the stuff that either recent or
recently touched. Which I think would reasonable...

Daniel

Marcus Denker <marcus at ira.uka.de> wrote:
> 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 included, superseded, not for the image, and so on).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