>>>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