AWT : Automatic call to System.exit(0)

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jun 18, 1999, Godmar Back <gback at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> We should add a "Closed" category to the bug database and
> move closed bugs there.  This way, you'll only see the
> open bugs and don't get confused.

That's exactly what we don't want to do, because we want people to be
able to find closed bug reports too, so that we don't get multiple bug
reports about the same problem, and so that they can tell whether
upgrading to a newer version will fix their problem.  If we created a
single `closed' category, it would soon become a mess of unclassified
bug reports, which would make it *harder* for people to search.

This must be the 6th time I'll try to explain to Godmar and Archie the
way Jitterbug works; it seems to me they just don't want to understand
:-(

I'm Cc'ing the jitterbug mailing list to get better coverage and more
well-informed opinions.

Unfortunately, Jitterbug doesn't offer a `closed' attribute.  Its
documentation suggests that `unreplied' and `pending' bug reports be
considered open.  The meaning of `unreplied' is quite obvious;
`pending' is a bit harder, and that's where people get confused: a
report is `pending' if it hasn't been ``touched'' after the last
`followup' came in.  ``touch'' means either `reply' or `change notes'.
A `followup' is a message that comes from the user (or anybody else,
for that matter, with a subject that identifies the Problem Report),
with additional information on that bug report.

So it's not a matter of being complicated (it is not!), it's just a
matter of understanding the concepts of the tool we're trying to use.
If it was done the way it was, there's a reason for that.  You have
three choices: (i) understanding the underlying assumptions of the
tool and using it as it was supposed to be used, (ii) introducing
complication to make it work in a way it was not designed to, or (iii)
adopting a tool that matches your expectations.

Jitterbug assumes that, when you reply to a bug report, you're saying
`thanks for your bug report.  The bug was fixed on release 1.2.3'', or
asking for further details, in which case you expect a followup.  When
such a followup comes in, the bug report becomes `pending'.  But maybe
it was just the user saying `thank you', so you may not want to reply
once again, then you can close it by just `changing notes'.

We could create one `*-closed' category for each `*' category, but
that means that, whenever we `reply' to a bug report, closing it, we'd
*also* have to move it from one category to another.  Moreover, we'd
be introducing redundancy, since you can already know, in Jitterbug,
whether a bug report is open or not: if it is `pending' or
`unreplied', it is open, otherwise it is closed.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@dcc.unicamp.br  aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
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