Mantis bug database is filled with bug duplicates.
Introversion has stated recently that they will fix bugs soon, but the more time they spend sifting through thousands of bugs in attempt to find useful information, the less time they will spend on actually fixing them, right?
In order to help, you need a Mantis account. This is not the same as forum account. John explains how to create a Mantis account here.
There are about 3000 bugs in Mantis already. Many of them are duplicates or issues that have been resolved a long time ago. I have closed 40 bugs as duplicates and such in a couple of hours and I keep at it, but there are only 4 people with permissions and expertise necessary to do this and the bugfix month has only 30 days. Here is what You can do to help:
- If you can find groups of bug duplicates and post links to them in this thread, it would really help me and other moderators
- If you would find an issue which you can not reproduce anymore, comment on it saying that you can't reproduce on Alpha-21 and link the bug in this thread.
- If you would find an issue which has unclear reproduction steps and it doesn't seem to happen in Alpha-21, link the bug in this thread, so we can ask the reporter if it still occurs (and we'll change the state to "Feedback". If nobody will answer for a week, there is not much that IV can do with it, so it'll get closed)
- If you would find a feature request which has not Severity field set to feature, link it here.
You can find examples on how to report in the next post.
There are also some targeted assignments available if you think you can handle it. See here for the first batch of'em.
----
Technical details of deduplication procedure (you don't have to read unless you are a Mantis moderator):
How to decide which bug is to be closed as duplicate and which should remain open?
- If one of the bugs in the family has a "Target version" field set, it means IV has looked on a bug, understood it and planned to fix it, so this will stay open and the others will be deduplicated. This is the most important rule.
- The voting system is important. If a bug is in top20 vote-wise, we'll close the other ones to respect and preserve votes.
- The industry standard is to assume that the bug which has been reported first is the original and the rest are duplicates
- Sometimes the first bug reported has very low quality of description because people didn't really know back then what causes the bug, they could only see the effect. In that case description may be improved or we can just deduplicate to the bug which has the best description.