Comment 4 for bug 160872

On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 05:29 +0000, Lenny Foner wrote:
> Aargh! And, having closed the window in which I reported -this-
> problem, I couldn't even locate it again without finding it via the
> email I just got, since of course somebody invalidated this bug report
> and it failed to show up in my search. How enormously irritating! I
> mean, geez, invalid or not, the person who FILED it should be able to
> FIND it again, right? And commenters, etc? Making it vanish by default
> is pretty rude.

Having default bug searches matching closed bugs simply would not scale.
Closed bugs are also likely uninteresting to most of the population.
There are trivial ways to locate such bugs, as detailed below.

> So is there any way to search for bugs that ARE marked invalid?
> Otherwise, I'm going to have to grep through my old mail to find other
> bug reports just to check them, and that's way more work than I'm
> willing to do.

Try an advanced search, the link to which should be next to the search
button above most or all bug listings. There you can select additional
statuses to display (by default, Invalid, Won't Fix and Fix Released
bugs are hidden - they are the closed statuses).

> Also: As far as I can tell, I never received any mail when this bug was
> invalidated (I just rechecked---I was absolutely subscribed to the bug,
> so shouldn't I have been informed upon the state change?), -and- I
> cannot find out WHO invalidated it, nor WHY (no comment to that effect
> ---unless "rejected" by Ben Collins on 12 Jun 06 automatically marked it
> as "invalid", in which case it'd sure be nice if the terminology could
> be made consistent), -and- people are still commenting on it (most
> recently in August of this year to report that it's still broken in Edgy
> and Fiesty), -and- it's STILL broken in Gutsy (I just checked, and
> that's why I was trying to find this bug to comment on it). How did the
> people who commented on it recently manage to find it? And should one
> of them taken it upon themselves to change its state back to something
> that wasn't invalid? (They may not even have noticed---I sure didn't.
> That field is easy to miss if you're not looking for it, and it's in
> -gray-, which makes it just fade away on the screen...)

The Rejected status was renamed to Invalid, and Needs Info to
Incomplete, some months ago. It was Ben's action that you referenced
which caused the transition to the Invalid status. People *should* take
it upon themselves to reopen it - anybody who is logged in can. Ben also
left a clear instruction 18 months ago: reassign it to the Dapper
kernel, linux-source-2.6.15, if you could confirm it still existed.

Anybody who has found it most probably did so through Google or an
advanced search.

> I'm currently trying to decide whether to reopen it (and maybe try to
> mark #160413 as a duplicate), or just leave it closed and file a brand-
> new bug, since this unfixed problem is now TWO YEARS OLD and the fact
> that it claims to be in linux-source-2.6.10 is probably misleading
> people into thinking that it's already fixed somehow in a later release.
> (And I have information on a workaround, which might lead to what's
> going wrong, but I'm not going to bother filing it for a bug that
> nobody's going to see, since the point is to get it fixed, not vanished
> down a black hole somewhere.)

We're not going to notice bugs unless they are open - that's the point
of closing them! Test it on a modern kernel (Ubuntu 7.10, for example),
and reassign and reopen it on the linux-source-2.6.22 package if it is
still present. That will get it onto the kernel team's radar.

Filing a new, duplicate bug won't fix anything. It will just get
developers annoyed. We have quite enough bugs already.

Thanks,

--
William Grant