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Bug 199180

Summary:	Provide an easy way for reporters to dissociate themselves from bug reports
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Alex Blewitt <alex.blewitt>
Component:	Bugzilla	Assignee:	Eclipse Webmaster <webmaster>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	bjorn.freeman-benson, denis.roy, gunnar, karl.matthias
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description Alex Blewitt

2007-08-07 18:38:58 EDT

The current bugzilla interface does not allow a reporter to dissociate themselves from a bug that they have filed previously. If you are Cc'd on a bug, you can remove yourself from the Cc list, but you are unable to remove yourself from the reporters list.

There may be times when it is desirable (or even necessary) to remove yourself from a bug in bugzilla. One example might be when your e-mail account is being closed whilst at a period of university; another might be simply because you're getting spam from bugzilla changes that you are no longer interested in. Yet another reason might be when you feel that the bug has absolutely zero interest in being fixed and want to get the bug off your bug list in Mylyn or the bug tracking system.

In any case, the only way to achieve this at the moment is by marking the bug RESOLVED or CLOSED. This, in turn, doesn't necessarily help the project that the bug was reported against, but it is currently the only way that a reporter of a bug can get it off of their list. Unfortunately, over-protective project administrators can become under the misunderstanding that the bug is somehow property of them personally, whereas in reality the bug itself is merely licensed under the EPL under the terms of the agreement. In any case, a reasonable requirement is that a user may wish to become dissociated from their original report without having to terminate their account (or have their account terminated for them).

At present, I believe that only a manual process can be used to deal with this issue. However, it is a reasonable requirement that might be required by others in the future.

Comment 1 Karl Matthias

2007-08-07 19:04:09 EDT

As far as I know the only situation in which you can't remove yourself from a bug is if you are the reporter.  In all other cases you can do so in one manner or another.

At the moment removing the reporter is best handled by someone on the project creating a new bug and marking the original as a duplicate.  

That's really the best solution IMHO, because other solutions could result in bugs being close prematurely while they are still pending review by the project (valid or not) or currently being discussed/worked on.

I believe the best solution is if projects and committers work together to migrate bugs as needed.

Comment 2 Gunnar Wagenknecht

2007-08-08 01:07:47 EDT

You are the reporter. That is part of the history of that issue and it's even immutable. No matter how you look at it, you are the reporter. I doubt that you will be able to convince any Bugzilla committer to implement your request or accept a patch.

Having said that, there is a workaround. Simply turn off bug mails for bugs you where your relationship is reporter and start CC'ing yourself on bugs you report. Thus, when you are no longer interested in a bug reported by yourself you can simply remove yourself from the CC list and won't receive further bug mails.

Comment 3 Denis Roy

2007-08-13 09:55:07 EDT

I'll echo Gunnar's comments -- I just don't see how it's possible to un-report a bug.

Closing as WONTFIX but the better resolution would be "NOT_OURS_TO_FIX".  We won't do anything for this.  At best, this bug should be reported against Mozilla's Bugzilla product, not against Eclipse's usage of Bugzilla.

Comment 4 Alex Blewitt

2007-08-13 18:14:45 EDT

Oh well. I guess the moral of this story is don't raise bugs against dead-end projects where there's no hope of them ever being fixed.