I just sent user DuaelFr the following message:

My tracker just got pinged over 50 times by your script prematurely closing issues I've participated in. I don't want to have to manually go in and reopen all of them (the overwhelming majority of which are still valid, just need the version bumped to the latest). In fact, your script has a bug, since it closed issues in a 7.x-1.x-dev branch that *are* a supported version, for example: #130953-3: Allow admins to customize the notification email.

DId you discuss the idea of writing a script to automatically close a bunch of issues via a script anywhere, or did you just unilaterally decide this was a good idea? This is the sort of thing that should have been debated in an issue on d.o first. If you did that, it would have been nice to include a link to that discussion in your automated response. If you never proposed this and got agreement it was worth doing (nor properly tested before deploying it in the wild), it's highly irresponsible of you, and I wanted to express my displeasure with your choices.

I wanted to open a public issue about what to do now instead of just asking him directly via his contact tab to undo his automated thing (which might just make it worse, since the initial script was buggy). Some possible approaches:

A) Do nothing and make people manually clean up the mess

B) Ask DuaelFr to modify his script to undo the changes

Other?

Thoughts?

Alas,
-Derek

Comments

duaelfr’s picture

duaelfr
he/him
Primary language French
Location Montpellier, France
commented

Hi,

I am sorry for the inconvenience but this is not a real automatic script as I have to do this manually for each Issue, the script just populates the form.
Your issue was tagged for an unsupported version of both Drupal and your own module. Moreover, the last comment on the quoted issue was near 4 years old so nothing could allow me to understand the issue was ever active.

The "script" only close issues for the 5.x drupal version and older and only if they have not been changed for more than 6 month.
Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience but this old issues are polluting the issues lists and, indeed, the bug bingo used by developpers wiling to help.

I stay open to discussion.
I will inform my co-closers to stop their activity until this issue is closed.

Best regards,

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

While I think it is a good idea to close old issues I think this is a task that should be left to the maintainer or only be done after getting approval.

If you don't want old issues to show up in bug bingo please supply a patch for this.

simon georges’s picture

simon georges commented

killes@www.drop.org, I was actually going to reference #1093206: Re-think the patch/bug bingo links from the contributor block to explain how we got here (although I am not currently using the script from Duaelfr, I'm part of the team that is currently trying to close these old issues).
We apologize if we provoked any inconvenience, and, of course, @dww, we'll fix this ourselves if need be.

I just found the code for the bug-bingo, I'll try to provide a patch as soon as possible.

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented

I'm glad to know you were manually triggering these changes, and it wasn't a script that was just crawling all the issue queues on d.o to close any issue marked 5.x or lower.

I could have sworn there was an issue that started as a 7.x issue that you had closed, but maybe I got confused with all the browser tabs I had open and that initial reply I made in an issue before I realized it was a wide-spread problem.

Anyway, because #1093650: Provide VBO support for issue management is still not done, most issue queue users and maintainers have no good way to bulk update a lot of issues at once. So, if you maintain an old module like signup that has a ton of issues built up over many years, when you port to a new version (7.x) and deprecate an older version (5.x) there's no easy way to move all the 5.x issues up to 6.x or 7.x. So, I tend to just leave them open with the older version until I need to touch the issue for some reason.

Totally agreed with killes:
- If your concern is not having 5.x contrib issues show up in bug bingo, #1093206: Re-think the patch/bug bingo links from the contributor block is a much better solution.
- Unless you get agreement from specific contrib maintainers that they want to automatically close all issues that meet X criteria, I'd recommend not "helping" in this way on your own. ;)

Meanwhile, can you at least reopen all the issues of mine that you closed? ;)

Thanks,
-Derek

simon georges’s picture

simon georges commented

So:
- I'm currently working on a patch for the "bug bingo" functionality;
- I'll re-open the issues we closed for your project;
- Thanks for pointing out the #1093650: Provide VBO support for issue management, are you looking for some help for it? (as a maintainer myself, I'd find that really useful).

All of this started because I'm wondering what all these open issues for totally unsupported modules (like the ones that only have a 4.x version or master version) are showing as an image for people trying to ascertain the quality of Drupal in general (using the global statistics as a (obviously wrong) general metric, for example).

simon georges’s picture

simon georges commented

The issues for Signup module have been reset to their previous statuses. @dww, do you have another module impacted by this?

simon georges’s picture

simon georges commented

First attempt at a bingo patch in #335828: Bug Bingo for specific versions if the user specifies it.

dddave’s picture

dddave commented
Status: Active » Fixed

I guess...

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.