Should we close all tickets with milestone "sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix"?

[Samuel Lelievre]

I'm wondering if we should close all trac tickets whose milestone

has been set to "sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix"?

Review them first? Some already have "positive review".

http://trac.sagemath.org/milestone/sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix

http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=positive_review&status=needs_work&status=needs_review&status=needs_info&status=new&group=status&milestone=sage-duplicate%2Finvalid%2Fwontfix

[Jori Mäntysalo]

On Thu, 19 May 2016, Samuel Lelievre wrote:

> I'm wondering if we should close all trac tickets whose milestone
> has been set to "sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix"?
> Review them first? Some already have "positive review".

Volker goes through wontfix/positive -tickets sometimes.

But for example in http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/19029 I asked: "- -
three months have gone, I suggest that we close this ticket. Click to
positive_review if you agree." And on http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/9155
I got a good suggestion from Frédéric for an old ticket.

A suggestion: Add a "random old ticket" -link to trac (IF it is easy to
do). Maybe then some developers will take a habit of clicking it
sometimes.

--
Jori Mäntysalo

[kcrisman]

I'm wondering if we should close all trac tickets whose milestone

has been set to "sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix"?

Review them first? Some already have "positive review".

Definitely not close all of them, because there are sometimes disagreements.  But if someone set to positive review it should hopefully be ok.  I would personally think that you'd want two eyes to confirm this kind, just to avoid any shenanigans or whatever.  The review would just need to review that indeed it's a dup, so localized (or just user error with no need for better doc) that it's invalid, or one that is so unlikely to be of interest or possible that it's wontfix.  Some of the latter maybe should be recategorized under sage-wishlist, which I think is a milestone.

 

http://trac.sagemath.org/milestone/sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix

http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=positive_review&status=needs_work&status=needs_review&status=needs_info&status=new&group=status&milestone=sage-duplicate%2Finvalid%2Fwontfix

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2016-05-19 15:01, kcrisman wrote:
> Some of the latter maybe should be recategorized under sage-wishlist,
> which I think is a milestone.

I'm not sure if it's useful to keep "wishlist" tickets open if nobody
intends to work on them. There are quite some old tickets of the form "I
plan to implement feature X in Sage". If the person who posted that
ticket does not actually implement feature X and nobody else has shown
interest in the ticket, I think it's safe to just close the ticket.

Jeroen.

[John Cremona]

Are you going to name-and-shame? I hope not...

John

>
> Jeroen.
>
>
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[Erik Bray]

I generally like to keep those kinds of tickets only unless there is
some reason it has been explicitly ruled out.. YMMV.

But there are also a ton of tickets that can and should be closed. It
would be nice if we could triage those without the whole thing relying
on one person. I don't think I've ever worked on another project
where only one person can close tickets (at most there's someone whose
job it is to occasionally review closed tickets).

[Jori Mäntysalo]

On Thu, 19 May 2016, Jeroen Demeyer wrote:

> I'm not sure if it's useful to keep "wishlist" tickets open if nobody
> intends to work on them. There are quite some old tickets of the form "I
> plan to implement feature X in Sage". If the person who posted that
> ticket does not actually implement feature X and nobody else has shown
> interest in the ticket, I think it's safe to just close the ticket.

I had for example Frattini sublattice laying around for almost a year
without any progress. And some tickets might have some plans, links to
papers etc. It is psychologically hard to close them -- so maybe a wiki
page for "random wishes without implementation in foreseeable future"?

But maybe for example http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/8170 could be just
closed?

--
Jori Mäntysalo

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2016-05-19 16:11, John Cremona wrote:
> Are you going to name-and-shame? I hope not...

I'm not going to name, but I don't consider it a "shame" anyway. I
totally understand how it can happen that somebody intends to implement
something but does not manage, for whatever reason.

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2016-05-19 16:23, Erik Bray wrote:
> I don't think I've ever worked on another project
> where only one person can close tickets (at most there's someone whose
> job it is to occasionally review closed tickets).

For technical reasons, I think it's good that most people cannot close
or reopen tickets. Not everybody is aware of the way how we develop Sage
and use Trac.

Just set the milestone to sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix and the status
to positive_review.

[Erik Bray]

If that's the procedure then can somebody go and close all these?

http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=positive_review&milestone=sage-duplicate%2Finvalid%2Fwontfix&col=id&col=summary&col=milestone&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=component&order=priority

You know you want to... 46 closed tickets in one fell swoop ought to
be satisfying :)

[kcrisman]

> Are you going to name-and-shame?  I hope not...

I'm not going to name, but I don't consider it a "shame" anyway. I
totally understand how it can happen that somebody intends to implement
something but does not manage, for whatever reason.

My feeling is that it's good to have a record of all these requests.  I've certainly seen things languish for years and all of a sudden get dealt with (e.g. rws' recent improvements in Pynac). 

> But maybe for example http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/8170 could be just closed? 

Was that a typo for another ticket?

[Jori Mäntysalo]

On Thu, 19 May 2016, kcrisman wrote:

>> But maybe for example http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/8170 could be just closed? 
>
> Was that a typo for another ticket?

No. It is a good example of what Jeroen said, I think. A reasonable
suggestion made 6 years ago, no comments at all after that, no comments
telling how this should be done etc.

There is nothing wrong with the ticket. But will it help to have it open?

This could be also a part of larger metaticket "Additions to group
theory", maybe?

--
Jori Mäntysalo

[Johan S. R. Nielsen]

>>>But maybe for examplehttp://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/8170could be justclosed?

>>
>> Was that a typo for another ticket?
>
> No. It is a good example of what Jeroen said, I think. A reasonable
> suggestion made 6 years ago, no comments at all after that, no comments
> telling how this should be done etc.
>
> There is nothing wrong with the ticket. But will it help to have it open?

That ticket notes an API inconsistency in Sage (which is a type of
defect/bug), and it is a valuable observation that it's there and should
be fixed (at some point). If don't think such a ticket should be closed
except if we maintain some sort of list of stuff to fix (but what is a
ticket system other than exactly that?). Once in a while, people do
browse through open tickets on their favourite component of Sage.

I have this example which I understand to be closer to what Jeroen
meant: http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/13252
It was completely unspecific, had no code contents and was old, so I
closed it as invalid. Even had it been more specific (like "Implement
Information-Set decoding for linear codes") it could have been closed
since it's only value would be to state that Sage currently doesn't have
that feature -- which is obvious.

In the ACTIS team working on coding theory, we wrote up a list of
small-to-medium issues with LinearCode and friends that we, in the long
run, wanted to change:

https://bitbucket.org/lucasdavid/sage_coding_project/issues/155/problems-with-linear_codepy

But this is an inferior solution to making Trac tickets out of all those
issues -- we went with the above list only out of laziness.

Best,
Johan

[kcrisman]

>>>But maybe for examplehttp://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/8170could be justclosed?
>>
>> Was that a typo for another ticket?
>
> No. It is a good example of what Jeroen said, I think. A reasonable
> suggestion made 6 years ago, no comments at all after that, no comments
> telling how this should be done etc.
>
> There is nothing wrong with the ticket. But will it help to have it open?

That ticket notes an API inconsistency in Sage (which is a type of
defect/bug), and it is a valuable observation that it's there and should
be fixed (at some point). If don't think such a ticket should be closed
except if we maintain some sort of list of stuff to fix (but what is a
ticket system other than exactly that?). Once in a while, people do
browse through open tickets on their favourite component of Sage.

Precisely.

 

I have this example which I understand to be closer to what Jeroen
meant: http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/13252
It was completely unspecific, had no code contents and was old, so I
closed it as invalid.

This is a great example, and even if the originator hadn't responded, it would be a good sort of triage.

That said, if there are many "trivial" tickets that have various typos or things reported, creating a larger ticket that puts them all together and closing the others as dups seems very reasonable, this has been done before.  (As long as all relevant info is copied to the new ticket!)

[Travis Scrimshaw]

My 2 cents: Leave any wishlist items open; people may be looking for things to implement and someone might not know this was something somebody (at one point) was interested in having.

+1 to closing all positively reviewed duplicate/invalid/wontfix tickets.

Best,
Travis

[Frédéric Chapoton]

Hello,

May please somebody close all the 69 positive-reviewed duplicate/invalid/wontfix tickets ?

if Volker has no time for that, maybe somebody else should be given the power to do that ?

Frédéric

[Erik Bray]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Frédéric Chapoton
<fchap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> May please somebody close all the 69 positive-reviewed
> duplicate/invalid/wontfix tickets ?
>
> if Volker has no time for that, maybe somebody else should be given the
> power to do that ?

I can do it, if no one objects. It's just a quick batch edit.

> Le jeudi 19 mai 2016 10:51:20 UTC+2, Samuel Lelievre a écrit :
>>
>> I'm wondering if we should close all trac tickets whose milestone
>> has been set to "sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix"?
>> Review them first? Some already have "positive review".
>>
>> http://trac.sagemath.org/milestone/sage-duplicate/invalid/wontfix
>>
>>
>> http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=positive_review&status=needs_work&status=needs_review&status=needs_info&status=new&group=status&milestone=sage-duplicate%2Finvalid%2Fwontfix
>

[kcrisman]

On Tuesday, August 30, 2016 at 5:10:15 AM UTC-4, Frédéric Chapoton wrote:

Hello,

May please somebody close all the 69 positive-reviewed duplicate/invalid/wontfix tickets ?

if Volker has no time for that, maybe somebody else should be given the power to do that ?

Hmm, usually in the past he has closed them, though.  I think nowadays he might only close them at the end of a release series?

- kcrisman 

[Volker Braun]

Go for it ;-)

[leif]

Frédéric Chapoton wrote:
> Hello,
>
> May *please* somebody close all the *69* positive-reviewed

> duplicate/invalid/wontfix tickets ?
>
> if Volker has no time for that, maybe somebody else should be given the
> power to do that ?

Well, a couple do have the power, but the problem is that they get cc'ed
to each and every ticket they batch-modify (hence the account vbraun_spam).

In this case perhaps less of a problem, since there usually isn't much
activity after such tickets have been closed.

Anyway, our current policy is that *only* the release manager is allowed
to close tickets, so I wouldn't do without first asking.

(Although he probably doesn't have the time to answer either... ;-) )


-leif

[Jeroen Demeyer]

On 2016-08-30 19:44, leif wrote:
> Anyway, our current policy is that *only* the release manager is allowed
> to close tickets, so I wouldn't do without first asking.

I have the "power" to close tickets, but I don't do that because of this
reason. The only exceptions are tickets which are obviously mistakes or
spam.

[Erik Bray]

I think it' should be fine to close tickets so long as it's already
been signed off on as close-able in some sense or another.

[leif]

Well, we once had release notes...

... where also tickets closed (but not merged) within the current
release cycle were listed.

Since duplicate/invalid/wontfix is a *milestone* (!), it's not easy to
recover these when they've already been closed. In fact, also
duplicates were closed /after/ the other ticket(s) fixing an issue had
been merged and released.


-leif

[leif]

leif wrote:
> Erik Bray wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 10:12 PM, Jeroen Demeyer <jdem...@cage.ugent.be> wrote:
>>> On 2016-08-30 19:44, leif wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, our current policy is that *only* the release manager is allowed
>>>> to close tickets, so I wouldn't do without first asking.
>>>
>>>
>>> I have the "power" to close tickets, but I don't do that because of this
>>> reason. The only exceptions are tickets which are obviously mistakes or
>>> spam.
>>
>> I think it' should be fine to close tickets so long as it's already
>> been signed off on as close-able in some sense or another.
>
> Well, we once had release notes...
>

> .... where also tickets closed (but not merged) within the current

> release cycle were listed.
>
> Since duplicate/invalid/wontfix is a *milestone* (!), it's not easy to
> recover these when they've already been closed. In fact, also
> duplicates were closed /after/ the other ticket(s) fixing an issue had
> been merged and released.

P.S.: I of course meant "duplicates" in the sense of being superseded
by another ticket, not such reporting exactly the same issue. Still,
also positively reviewed /true/ duplicates were closed by the release
manager, after releasing the next "stable" release.


-leif