[Zope-dev] Re: [Zope-Coders] Collector Status Meanings

[Chris McDonough]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 13:54, Chris Withers wrote:
> Chris McDonough wrote:
> > I don't think deferred is useless.  I used deferred to mean "stuff that
> > isn't so important that it needs to be fixed now, but stuff that should
> > be fixed nonetheless".
> 
> Sutff in this state can be left in pending, as most of it is now...
> 
> > IOW, deferred to me means it's been looked at,
> > it's been determined to be a real problem, but it's just not possible to
> > fix given resource constraints.  
> 
> pending with a comment is how this works in practice...

Maybe your practice... that's not how I've done it.  My understanding of
the states has always been what Ken showed.

> > "Wontfix" doesn't mean this to me;
> > instead it means it just won't get fixed ever.
> 
> Yep, but there's nothing stopping people picking up a wontfix if they 
> want to fix it, it just means it's taken out of the default issue list...

But needing to wade through a bunch of wontfixes that are just responses
to bad bugreporting to find the couple that were actually just blocked
on a lack of resources is kinda silly.  I won't do it; I can't imagine
someone else doing it.

> > It's ok to
> > leave some issues pending long-term, and this is what "deferred" is
> > for.  If that's a "dumping ground", I think it's ok.
> 
> They can stay in the pending state then, plenty of issues stay in the 
> pending state for years, so I see no difference between your use of 
> deferred and the current use of pending...

The difference is that some pending items haven't even been looked at in
earnest.  I usually put things in deferred only after I've spent a
half-hour or hour or so trying to fix the thing and I've realized that
it might take, say, a week to actually fix it.  OTOH, if I spent two
minutes trying to fix something and fail but I still have no idea how
long it would actually take to fix, I leave it in pending state.

I'm not sure I care enough to further argue, but I'll note that you're
suggesting that we change the meaning of deferred to something other
than long-term-pending and communicating this decision to all longtime
collector participants is gonna be hard and the result will probably be
confusing.

- C