Ticket: How to fill "Version" and how useful is it

[skyper]

This came up on #23393 see GerdP:

When do we set version to latest? When it

• also is reproducible with latest and with tested or
• only with latest and not with tested?

My response skyper:

Good question. Personally, I set it according to the status report but it rapidly changes anyway from latest to tested to old and I have the feeling this version info is not much useful compared to the version number from the status report.

And GerdP's thoughts:

I thought it should only be set to latest when it is not reproducible with tested. Since that means that it is very likely a regression of a recent change and thus easier to fix AND of higher priority.

[stoecker]

I personally don't find it important at all. I'd remove it, but as it is a standard field I can't get rid of it so easily. So it has two selectable options only ;-)

We could add all version there, but that would fast get much work and totally overflowing and bug reporters probably would most of the time ignore it.

So it will stay as it is, not very helpful, but existing. I know there is probably another plugin to hide it, but there are already enough which I need to maintain.

P.S. The Trac instance is already very good with only 1 useless field. I know other bug trackers which haven dozens of them.

[gaben]

Thanks for asking, I had mixed feelings about this field, so I can share the same.

When I'm looking at old tickets, this field already has no meaning for me, as there were probably hundreds of new tickets and at least a handful of commits made. It's not the latest and not (latest) tested anymore.

When it's a new ticket, the first thing I check after the description is the revision number, not the Trac field.

So in summary, I just ignore it completely.

It doesn't mean it's completely useless. I can imagine someone opens a ticket with [major or higher - tested], in that case, you could receive a priority alert (I don't have a better wording), but it's minority and almost never happens.

[taylor.smock]

I don't really use the Version field either -- I look at the revision in the ticket.

About the "only" thing that would make that field useful (to me) would be if it was autofilled with the revision from the status report. This would take coding work on the backend, so it won't happen. Especially since I think we'd want to detect "old" versions and ask them to update first.