On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 11:13 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
This is not the theory; the primary reason for marking bugs triaged is intended to be for the benefit of developers. Whether or not it works this way in practice.
The benefit to the developer would be in properly assigning the bug to the right component, or getting enough useful information out of the reporter. Such things should be evident without any other marking by a triager. Either there was value added to the bug and visible to the maintainer, or there was nothing more to add. In either case, the value to the maintainer is there whether the triager has left footprints or not, so it seems that the actual value of the /footprint/ is to prevent multiple attempts at triaging.
No, the idea is to allow developers to pay attention mainly to issues that have been triaged. To do this they need to know which are which. But there's not much point arguing about this, as all proposals allow it to happen.
Triage can accomplish all of their goals without ever touching the bug state. Why spend time and effort fighting over something that clearly doesn't matter?
Because it's the status quo, and changing it requires either significant upheavals in existing bugs, or a period of confusion where multiple methods are in use. Either of these is a 'cost', so we have to demonstrate a sufficient benefit to make it worthwhile.