Package: bugs.debian.org
Severity: normal

Some time after a ticket is closed, it is "archived". One useful effect of 
archival is that archived ticket are filtered by default when listing a package's 
tickets. The user can list archived tickets, unarchived tickets, or both.

Archival causes multiple bugs, many of which are reported. I hit one more when 
replying to a message which had closed a ticket, as can be seen below. 
Thankfully, the ITS sends an error message which hints that archival may be the 
problem (as was the case in my reply below), so the problem can be noticed, and 
worked around by ordering the ITS to unarchive the ticket, as explained in 
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control#unarchive

It is not entirely clear how archival works and why it happens. The only 
benefit I can see is to act as a filter for no longer relevant tickets. This 
advantage could easily be substituted by adding a filter on the ticket's status 
which could be tuned to disregard closures in the last x days, although the 
good solution would be to list all tickets affecting a given set of versions.

Ticket archival was implemented at a time where resources were quite limited, 
to replace... pure ticket deletion: 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=9705
If there are no other advantages, I guess archival is no longer a good strategy 
and should simply be eliminated. One corner case to consider is tickets against 
pseudo-packages (no versions). Otherwise, we should simply accept mail to 
archived tickets.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date:   Mon, 03 Jun 2013 03:33:17 +0000
From:   Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-dae...@googlemail.com>
To:     chea...@gmail.com



Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     704...@bugs.debian.org

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the 
recipient domain bugs.debian.org by buxtehude.debian.org. [140.211.166.26].

The error that the other server returned was:
550 Unknown or archived bug

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Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2013 23:33:30 -0400
From: Filipus Klutiero<chea...@gmail.com>
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To: Jonathan Nieder<jrnie...@gmail.com>, cont...@bugs.debian.org
CC: 704...@bugs.debian.org
Subject: Re: [bugs.debian.org] Ticket priorities
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reopen 704874
thanks

Hi Jonathan,

On 2013-04-07 18:11, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
 Hi,

 Filipus Klutiero wrote:

                                                 Currently, all wishlist
 tickets show together, without any distinction according to costs or
 benefits.
 I think splitting up bugs according to one's personal priorities can
 be a valuable thing when the bookkeeping is not too much trouble.  The
 main problem with using a shared field for that is that different
 people and organizations can have different priorities.

Indeed. Importance is definitely not the same to everyone, even though we 
currently track it as a shared field. Investment can also be considered as 
variable if it is considered as the time the viewer would require to address 
the problem (if I don't know C++, my priority for an issue in a C++ program 
would be much lower than for a C++ programmer, even if we both consider that 
the issue has equal importance). As priority is a combination of both, it could 
be argued that it is even more personal than importance.
At least importance and priority should be customizable in an ideal world.

 Would usertags work for this purpose for you?



Short answer: no.

Long answer: It's possible to make for example a "prioritary" tag, but this 
would only give a simplistic classification. Priority is relative, so tracking it via 
boolean flags would be poor. We could achieve a higher accuracy using several tags like 
unimportant, lowimportance, normalimportance, etc, but this would also be cumbersome 
(changing priority would mean removing a tag and tagging again, for example). And the 
reality is that years after the introduction of usertags, I'm not aware of anyone who 
found them good enough to prioritize issues. There are however 2 tags used for 
prioritization: patch and wontfix. Tickets tagged patch require an investment much lower 
than others on average since most of the investment should be past. Conversely, wontfix 
is used by many developers in the sense of

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