> It seems the main issues are:
>
> 1. We have to many open, stale tickets.
> 2. If we close tickets we will hurt peoples feelings/people think that
> a closed ticket is a permanent state and that it should not be
> reopened.
>
> IMHO the simple solution is that when one closes a ticket, the ticket
> comment should simply say something like "This ticket is being closed
> due to xxxxx. Feel free to repoen this tick once xxxx has been added,
> or to discuss the merits of this action. Thanks for taking the time to
> help your community!"
+1 on Steve's idea here. Having this little extra text should smooth
things a little for those of us with less thick skin. 
I have reasonably thick skin. I'll also note that the tickets involved
*did* have a message about what needed to be fixed and done to get the patch
accepted.
The thing that got me going was that a report of a material defect in Rails
was handled more harshly *because* it had a patch. Say what you like about
how closing a ticket isn't the end of the world, it's pretty simple to
understand that if my tickets get shuffled off the "Bugs which haven't been
[...] fixed" page only when I provide a patch, I'm less likely to submit
patches and I'll just stick to reporting the bugs.
What I'm agitating for is one of two things:
* Set a clear and obvious policy that defect reports without a complete test
case will be closed. I've noticed lifofifo went and closed a bunch of
tickets with "Please attach tests/patch", but reopened them again a couple
of hours later. Presumably the policy isn't to reject tickets without
test cases, then?
*OR*
* Change the policy that defect reports with incomplete patches get closed.
Comment on them, set 'patchstatus=incomplete' or a 'patch-incomplete' tag
or whatever, but don't *close* them. They're valid defect reports and
should be placed with the rest of the valid defect reports, wherever that
may choose to be. (Handling of invalid defect reports is the same whether
there's a patch attached or not).
I hope I've made myself clear this time around. Defect reports, inasmuch as
they document a defect, should not be treated differently based on whether
there's a patch. The patch handling process is a separate issue.
Do these steps apply for documentation as well? I'm not sure how to
write a test for a documentation change. Is that possible?
Same thing applies to test case fixes -- there's no test suite for the test
suite. Presumably with those they'd just go through the three reviewers
process.
- Matt
