3.4 and bug reports

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Feb-2011, Rik wrote:

| How do we want to handle the many reports on the bug tracker which deal
| with older versions of Octave?  Many distros, like Fedora, simply go
| through and close down the old reports and ask users to re-submit if the
| problem persists.  This is mildly rude, but also a big time-saver because a
| lot of these problems were with building intermediate development versions
| of Octave.  These will have been fixed by the 3.4.0 release, or they would
| need to be updated anyways to make it clear that something is still wrong.

I don't think it makes sense to close everything just because there is
a new release.  But it would be helpful to go back and check old
reports again.  If they appear to be fixed with the new release, then
I'd say it's OK to close them.  I'm not sure what to do about those
that can't be duplicated or for which we can't get responses to
questions we ask to clarify our understanding of the problem (usually
that means we are having trouble with duplicating the problem).  If we
just close them, then we may be ignoring real problems, but that
happen on systems we don't have, or that happen for specific sets of
dependencies, compiler and library versions, etc., that are not clear
from the report.

jwe