36919 - unconfirmed bug with duplicate should become new

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Dawn Endico]

when a bug is marked a duplicate of an unconfirmed bug, the unconfirmed
bug should automatically have its status changed to 'new'. This should be
enough to verify that the bug is a real one. I've found several old
unconfirmed bugs that had duplicates. Since the bugs are marked 'unconfirmed'
they aren't showing up on people's radar and aren't getting fixed.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

not sure of the logistics of it, but bugs are automatically confirmed when they 
get "x" number of votes on them...  maybe marking another bug as a duplicate of 
this one should add a vote to it.  Not sure how it would handle if the user who 
reported it had already used all their votes though.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

This would be easy to abuse.  Submit two identical bug reports, one gets marked 
as a dup of the other pretty quickly, and the other gets confirmed.

Comment 3

[Dawn Endico]

As far as I'm concerned that isn't an issue. The point of creating the
'unconfirmed' status was to insulate engineers from a flood of INVALID
and DUPLICATE bug reports. The fact that valid bugs are getting overlooked
is a worse problem than the possibility that someone might go to extraordinary
lengths to get people to notice their bug.

Comment 4

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

This isn't too hard to handle.  Do this if the bug is from a different reporter
OR the bug marked duplicate is itself confirmed.

However, I believe this proposal suffers exactly the same problem as the
proposal to automatically transfer votes, namely, it's not undoable.  I don't
think it's as serious though.

I don't like the way the voting and confirmation systems are tied together
however.

I think it would be better if there were "confirmation points" towards a
threshhold, independent of voting.  Each user can confirm a bug, and has a
"confirmation allocation" which counts for a specific number of points depending
on who they are (this is analogous to the current situation where some users can
simply vote (low allocation) whereas others can confirm (high allocation) ).

Reporters automatically confirm, which means some reporters with high enough
confirmation points get auto-confirm (like now), and also the reporter of a bug
marked duplicate would have their points transferred to the second bug (like
suggested).

You also would have unlimited confirmation points over the entire database,
which is one of the problems with confirming by votes.

You'd also need to record the users that have confirmed the bug, to prevent a
user putting points towards both, marking duplicate and getting a double amount
(and hence abusing the system by reporting duplicates as suggested).

As a concession to making the system easy to use, assigning ANY number of votes
to a bug should assign your entire confirmation allocation to the bug.  This is
a lot better than the current system where we have changed the browser and
mailnews components to one vote per bug just so as to prevent confirming in one
go.

Everyone should get the same amount of votes, but people should get a different
number of confirmation points.

Comment 5

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

*** Bug 25950 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Confirmation points => bug #56383

Comment 7

[Stephan Niemz]

moving to real milestones...

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

-> Bugzilla product

Comment 9

[Pham]

I don't understand this. Isn't DUPLICATES marked like
RESO DUPL

instead of
UNCO DUPL?

Is this an old bugzilla?

Comment 10

[Stephen Rasku]

This is to make the bug that the bug is a duplicate of.  So, if bug 123 is a
duplicate of bug 456, bug 123 will become "RESOLVED DUPLICATE" and bug 456 will
change from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.

Comment 11

[Andreas Krüger]

My bug 226418 wasn't unconfirmed, but already was new.

Some then found and kindly pointed out that it was the dupe of bug 225963.

So I, the author of bug 226418, decided to invalidate my own bug and mark
it a dupe of bug 225963.

The fact that we already had confirmation in 225963 was lost in that process.

In my opinion, if a bug that's presently "NEW" becomes the dupe of a bug
that's presently "UNCONFIRMED", that second bug should certainly be upgraded
to "NEW".

Comment 12

[Felix Miata]

*** Bug 251155 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[timeless]

i'm opposed.

instead, bugzilla should tell the person resolving the bug as a duplicate about
the discrepancy and offer the person the option of changing it.

Comment 14

[Frédéric Buclin]

I'm opposed too. If an enhancement has dupes, this doesn't mean this is something we want. We have votes for that. If a bug has dupes, then it's the job of triagers to confirm the bug, assuming they can reproduce the problem. A few days ago, we had dupes on b.m.o of an invalid bug (not a Bugzilla bug, but a misuse by users). This is something I wouldn't like to see automatically confirmed.

Comment 15

[Stefan Monov]

*** Bug 358477 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***