In response to my rant about
Debian's BTS, I got some mails about other project's handling of bug tracking system - I'm still looking through those.
More interestingly,
Joey Hess blogged about it and defended keeping old bug reports - which I also think. I explicitly talked about bug reports with no activity and no maintainer reaction. I took the time to look at some of the bugs Joey submitted and found some good examples for bugs and packages that obviously need help.
230485 is now in the ripe age of nearly three years. Almost three years is also the age of the last mail to that bug report, which was one maintainer setting the severity to important, without a comment. Since then, there has been no note if this bug is going to be fixed, how, when, why and who is going to do it. A user might get the impression that the maintainer simply doesn't care about this (or other) bugs. That's not a good thing, I believe.
271752 is also a good example. The bug seemed to be unreproducible, now someone found a way to reproduce it and ... nothing happened.
206605 is also weird - a patch is there (and we're talking about little grammar change here!), but no upload actually included it. Without a comment why it is not happening...
Keeping old bug reports to inform users of existing problems is OK. But not fixing bugs (or even trying to fix them) is a problem!
