On Fri, 25 May 2001, matthew green wrote:

> i'm fairly sure that gnats only supports those 5 states.

It seems that it can be made to support more status possibilities quite
easily.

> it's a marginal improvement, if any.  when PR's are submitted, hundreds
> of people get them in their mail box, so it isn't as if PR's aren't
> looked at when they are submitted.  having our gnats the same as
> everyone else's means that people familiar with gnats will be familiar
> with netbsd's gnats.

Well, but the submitter of PR doesn't get any confirmation that somebody
has realy readed her/his PR and started to work on it. Even that hundreds
of people look and read PRs doesn't guarantee anything. This change would
also help developers, this will eventualy split the number of open PRs, in
fact as time goes number of open PRs will go well under 50% of all not yet
closed PRs.

I don't know how developers see the number of open PRs, but if I where a
developer I would see it as a problem because the number of open PRs is so
overwhelming. If I have some big problem to solve, I will first split it
in smaller pieces which are easier to solve.

I think this issue has to be considered sooner of later. If you take a
look to this table http://www.NetBSD.org/Gnats/#table-year you'll notice
that if NetBSD is gaining users at current speed the number of PRs have
just started increase in tremendous speed. Last year was first when the
number of closed PRs per year went under the previous year. And I do
expect this trend to continue.

And I would like remind about this commerial bugtracking system called
Rational ClearQuest, they have nine different status possiblities.
They are submitted, assigned, turnedin, approved, fixed, evaluated,
closed, postponed and rejected.

In GNATS open status is representing submitted, assigned and turnedin.
analyzed is fixed, feedback is evaluated, GNATS closed is closed and
rejected. And finaly suspended is ClearQuest postponed. So you can see
that GNATS is matching with ClearQuest in end of PR life-cycle quite well,
but in start of life-cycle, GNATS open status has given too much of
"responsibility".

And about that familary with GNATS, you can't make any improvement without
changing anything or in other words "you can't make omelet without
breaking the eggs." And realy, everyone who is smart enough to use GNATS
is capable of understand why this kind change is made.

Best regards
Petri Koistinen