BMO/Resolution Proposal
This is a scratchpad for a possible proposal for changes to the resolutions used in bugzilla.mozilla.org. It is an accompaniment to, but independent of, Proposal 1 and Proposal 2 for changing the workflow.
What Is Possible
If we assume that the current number of resolutions in b.m.o. (7, plus MOVED and SUPPORT, which are deprecated) is about correct, we cannot increase granularity significantly without increasing the number too much. Therefore, requests for a greater number of more specific resolutions have a high bar to meet.
If we significantly alter the semantic range of a resolution, the question of migration inevitably arises. If we e.g. split WORKSFORME into "WAS_NEVER_BROKEN" and "FIXED_ELSEWHERE", no-one is going to retriage tens of thousands of bugs and work out which of the two new resolutions actually applies. We would have to accept some effective data loss or historical mislabelling in that case. So semantic range changes which include renaming also have a high bar.
It is possible to deprecate a Resolution, which means that old bugs will continue to bear it, but new ones cannot be set to it. So semantic range alterations may be better implemented by deprecating the old values and creating the new values, with no migration.
Pool of Ideas
Here is a quick survey of the resolutions used by popular Bugzillas (changing resolutions seems to be more common than changing the workflow), with my attempt to match up concepts:
Mozilla: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED INCOMPLETE EXPIRED SUPPORT Gnome: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE MOVED INCOMPLETE OBSOLETE NOTABUG NOTGNOME NOTXIMIAN GNOME1.X KDE: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED WAITINGFORINFO UNMAINTAINED UPSTREAM DOWNSTREAM BACKTRACE Apache: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED OOo: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED Eclipse: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED NOT_ECLIPSE Red Hat: Note1 WONTFIX DEFERRED DUPLICATE WORKSFORME INSUFFICIENT_DATA UPSTREAM NOTABUG CANTFIX CURRENTRELEASE RAWHIDE ERRATA NEXTRELEASE Mandriva: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED OLD REPORTEDUPSTREAM Gentoo: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME NEEDINFO OBSOLETE UPSTREAM CANTFIX TEST-REQUEST Novell: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED NORESPONSE UPSTREAM FEATURE NASA: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED Facebook: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED BY_DESIGN NEEDS_REPRO FDo: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED NOTOURBUG NOTABUG Wine: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED ABANDONED Wikimed: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER DUPLICATE WORKSFORME W3C: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX LATER REMIND DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED NEEDINFO PCulture: FIXED INVALID WONTFIX DUPLICATE WORKSFORME MOVED INCOMPLETE
(Note 1: Red Hat seem to have split FIXED into four; I didn't indicate that because it would have made the table very wide!)
- Resolutions can be deprecated; I've not taken the time to find out which ones are on each system (SUPPORT and MOVED are deprecated on b.m.o).
- Red Hat seem to have replaced INVALID with CANTFIX, but Gentoo has both. This suggests that they may be using different definitions for CANTFIX.
- LATER and REMIND were in earlier versions of Bugzilla, but were removed because they encouraged bad habits - resolving un-resolved bugs.
- DUPLICATE and FIXED have special meaning in Bugzilla and are non-deletable, so removing them or changing their name is rare.
- MOVED is used with Bugzilla's Moving support, which almost no-one uses! (It was originally coded to move bugs between b.m.o. and Netscape's internal installation.)
I suggest there is probably a high bar against changing names which are common across Bugzillas - Bugzilla is not an end-user-facing tool, and geeks often use multiple installs of it for different projects.
