Please Congratulate My New Assistant

[Timon Gehr]

On 24.01.21 14:00, Max Haughton wrote:
> On Sunday, 24 January 2021 at 12:36:16 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 18.01.21 10:21, Mike Parker wrote:
>>> Thanks once more to Symmetry Investments, we have a new paid staffer 
>>> in the D Language Foundation family.
>>>
>>> Though I call him my "assistant", I can already see he will be more 
>>> than that. He'll be taking some things off my shoulders, sure, but he 
>>> also has ideas of his own to bring into the mix. Adding him to the 
>>> team is certain to be a boon for the D community.
>>>
>>> So, a word of warning to those of you who haven't heard from me in a 
>>> while pestering you for blog posts: get used to the name "Max Haughton".
>>>
>>> And congratulate him while you're at it!
>>
>> Congratulations. However, Max seems to be just closing all enhancement 
>> requests on bugzilla as invalid. This is the behavior of a vandal. 
>> Please stop. Any policy that requires this is ill-advised. Issues are 
>> valuable and binning them like this is disrespectful to the time of 
>> the reporters.
> 
> I was going through trying to close things that are either not bugs 
> anymore because they haven't been touched from 2010 and they've been 
> fixed by entropy,

I can get behind this. You closed one of my issues that was fixed this 
way, but I don't usually report INVALID issues, this is why there is a 
WORKSFORME category.

> or language changes which will never be looked at 
> again because they aren't DIPs.

Of course they won't be looked at again if you claim they are invalid 
just by virtue of being enhancement requests. Obviously you looked at 
them now, so your reasoning here makes no sense. This is why there is an 
enhancement request category in the first place. They are not invalid 
issues, they are enhancement request issues.

> They're still in public record but 
> fundamentally they're just not useful anymore

Issues are not useful anymore when they are fixed or there is a good 
reason why they should not be fixed.

> - I was literally just 
> going through bugs FILO and trying to either reproduce or at least 
> characterise whether they even can be acted on by the foundation.
> ...
Why does it seem like people who are hired to help improve D instead 
always start closing bugzilla issues without actually fixing them? This 
is meaningless optimization of indicators that don't even mean what you 
seem to think they mean. It's a waste of time and resources.

> It's entirely possible I was overzealous and if I was, obviously reopen 
> them

I don't have time for that, I don't get notified for all of them, just 
the ones I reported or interacted with. I have no idea what other 
potentially valuable enhancement requests you closed with a 
condescending "INVALID" verdict just because they were enhancement requests.

Please reopen all enhancement requests that you closed even though they 
remain unfixed.

> but ultimately the enhancements have to go through a DIP because 
> it's not 2012 anymore.
> ...

That does not change what those enhancement requests are for, it just 
makes it a bit harder to fix them. Obviously, nowadays the proper way to 
get rid of enhancement requests is by pushing them through the DIP 
process (or perhaps just making a good point to the reporter why it 
would be a bad idea to implement them), but of course, that requires 
more work than a couple of clicks and button presses. Closing as invalid 
because it is an enhancement request is not a valid way to get rid of 
enhancement requests.

If you really want to enact a policy that new enhancement requests 
should be illegal, I guess DLF can do that even though it is obviously a 
stupid idea (a DIP is a lot more formal, a large bar to overcome, so you 
will lose a lot of ideas), but how about you at least don't close issues 
that were made at a time when this was the officially encouraged way to 
track ideas? IMNSHO it should stay this way, there is no reason to 
dislike enhancement requests. They don't have the same purpose as DIPs 
(and DIPs are sometimes even necessary to fix issues that are not 
enhancement requests, for example type system unsoundness).

> I also updated Stephen S's shared-delegate race condition bug to have a 
> test case that actually compiles, and that's from 2010 - theadsan 
> catches it now although it doesn't work with @safe either so I'm not 
> sure whether we should be embarrassed or not.
> 

There is certainly useful work to be done in the issue tracker. I am 
here objecting to certain systematic destructive practices that do not 
even have any upside. I wish this kind of behavior would stop forever. 
You are not the first person to engage into careless issue closing 
sprees. I think the underlying issue is a bad understanding of the value 
of issues in the issue tracker and some sort of irrational assignment of 
cost to open issues. Walter always says: Put this in bugzilla, it will 
get lost on the forums, and he is right.