Comment 9 for bug 4201

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 12:00:05AM -0000, Brad Bollenbach wrote:
> In practice, I've seen reporters change the status back to New from
> time to time.

I interpret 'time to time' that this usually doesn't happen, so we need
to deal this this somehow.

> A few questions:
>
> If we were to rely on using reassignment to designate from whom
> action is required to make progress on this bug, might that risk
> losing track of the bugs for which we were responsible?

Maybe. Although I would say that if you only need some small input from
someone, that it's easier to ask the person directly. If you need
someone to do actual work on the bug, assign the bug to him, and if you
need to finish the work, tell him to reassign it back to you when he's
done.

> As a solution for right now, what do you guys think of automatically
> flipping the status back to what it was before being set to "Needs
> Info" when a comment is added to a Needs Info bug?

That would be confusing. Seeing how you set NeedInfo while adding your
comment, I would say you use it as "this bug is under discussion". We
could flip the status back if we define NeedInfo as "needs info from
the reporter". Of course, the status should only be flipped back when
the reporter commented. I'm not sure if it's useful to actually flip it
back, though, since the status should probably be New, given that most
likely information was lacking from the bug report, and the bug triagers
should decide if the information is enough or not.

I agree, though, that changing the status automatically when the
relevant person has comment could be a good idea. This all depends on
how we want to use the NeedInfo status. We should talk to the distro
people, the ones who requested this status in the first place, and see
how they use it. Brad, maybe you could brain dump a short spec about it?
It feels that we're not going to solve this in a bug discussion. A small
spec, phone calls and mailing list discussions is probably the way to
go.