= phenomenon =
The Fedora bugzilla end of life message says
If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version.
However, bug reporters without special permissions cannot change versions nor reopen the bug when that bug belongs to an end of life release. This leads to a '''much''' worse user experience than the intention with the auto-closing of bugs.
Users may comment "please reopen", but it's more likely than average for bugs which got no response to also get no response to this, leading to strong user frustration.
Note that normal users ''can'' reopen their reported bugs marked CLOSED:WONTFIX in current releases. (And Fedora packagers have greater permissions.)
= reason =
I don't think this was always the case, although I found a [https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-December/146823.html short thread apparently discussing this in 2010]. The (quite old) [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping#End_of_Life_.28EOL.29 bugzappers EOL wiki page] says "''In the future we will seek an enhancement to bugzilla to disable the ability to file bugs against unmaintained versions as there is no value in doing so.''" This is now the case, and it is possible that this behavior is an unintended consequence of that change.
= recommendation =
This is pretty awful. If we hadn't, apparently, had this problem for so long, I'd go with ''Sky is Falling'' as severity.
I can see several options.
'''1.''' Ideally, we allow reporters of bugs to reversion closed bugs.
'''2.''' Failing that, we could make the EOL versions open again; that of course has the annoying consequences of everything associated with that.
'''3.''' Failing that, we should at least change the message. But I'd really like this to become more user-friendly and easier, not worse.
As you might have found, jreznik has been running these scripts, they don't run anywhere in infrastructure. I suppose we could move them in somewhere for higher visibility, but thats not the case now.
Additionally, we don't run bugzilla. ;)
So, I'd suggest:
1) file a bugzilla bug asking if they can set things so reporters of bugs can always reopen on newer releases. I'm not sure how hard this will be for them to implement, but they have been open to adjusting things for us in the past.
2) I would really really like to avoid this.
3) Please work with jreznik to adjust the wording on the messages used.
Kevin, I know we don't run bugzilla, but it is our problem. I'll file the bug against bugzilla, but I would also like to have a ticket to track this overall and I thought this was the most appropriate place. Would it be better to move it to FESCo?
Replying to [comment:2 kevin]:
As requested, scripts are hosted at https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/fedora-project-schedule.git/tree/scripts/closebugs but I'd be more than happy to put it into one place with other infrastructure stuff.
Btw. issues probably happened by removing "clone a bug" as many developers were against it, so it was changed to "reopen" but without knowledge about acls.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1028145
More details in the bug, not to split discussion.
Btw. I'd prefer more discussion here before going to Bugzilla guys with request as there's also option going back to the old behaviour.
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