Why cann't we re-open a BFAV group? Was:RE: Squeak 3.8 status

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Sat Aug 7 17:56:51 UTC 2004


On Saturday, August 7, 2004, at 11:18 AM, Thomas Koenig wrote:

> Does anyone already know why we can't we re-open a BFAV bug report?
> At first I'd assumed that it was a "policy" decision, but based on
> folks' comments that’s not the case.

Right, it was never a policy decision... it was simply never 
implemented.

> My next guess was that it's because we cannot "rewrite an email". I'm
> treating the BFAV server side as a black box and so I assume this to be
> a given.
> Now I'm wondering if reopening posts is a solvable problem on the 
> client
> side. I've been experimenting with ways to split and regroup posts from
> the client side already.  Regrouping faces similar problems and
> potential solutions.  In both cases, if we solve the problem on the
> client side it involves duplicating posts.  So if there is something I
> can invoke on the server side to update a post that would be helpful.
> Any insights about "why we cann't re-open a BFAV post" would be
> appreciated.

True, we can't "rewrite an email", but in some ways that's okay, 
because if you keep all the emails, you keep the history of what's 
happened.

I think right now the BFAV client doesn't classify groups according to 
the order in which posts appear.  In other words, if there's a 
"[closed]" anywhere in a group, right now it always treats it as 
closed.  We should be able to add a [reopened] tag, which moves a group 
back to the Review tab.  But it should only appear there if a 
[reopened] post appears *after* the last [closed] post.  It should also 
be possible to close a reopened post again, of course.

Actually, I've needed the same capability for moving an [approved] item 
back to Review status.  There are several groups under Approved right 
now (at the bottom of the list) that have some issue and should go back 
to Review.  We could probably also handle this with a [reopened] tag.

So, if we could enhance the BFAV client to do this, that would be a big 
improvement.  Should be doable.

I guess support for a new [reopened] tag also needs to be added to the 
BFAV server.  (I'm not quite sure why the BFAV server has to know about 
all the tags... I guess this is for performance reasons?)

Another BFAV improvement which is really needed is some sort of website 
which shows the current status of all fixes/enhancements for the last 
month, similar to Bert's old sqfixes site, so everyone has a quick/easy 
place to check what the status of something is.  I already emailed 
about that privately... I wanted to work on this after 3.7 is released 
if no one else gets to it.

Merging groups together would be more difficult with the current 
system... I know Ken has talked about eventually replacing the 
emailed-based server with something more robust.

- Doug


> Tom
>
>
> Alexander Lazareviæ wrote:
> Let me add, that with a fully-fledged bug tracking system we could
> easily do things, that are impossible or hard to do with the current 
> bug
> fix archive viewer. Some of the things are:
>
> Reliable registry: Using the subject of an email the BFAV guesses if 
> the
> email is a new report or an addition to an existing report. This can
> fail and in the worst case a report gets assigned to an already closed
> report and so just disappears.
> Merging: When two different reports describe the same issue it is hard
> to merge those just using BFAV. One reporter has to close his report 
> and
> resend the same report with the same subject line of the other report.
> Reopening: Once a report is closed you can't reopen it with BFAV.
> [snip]
>
>




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