Issue 371

see our tests with Caolan old accounts.

Assigning to Kat for investigation and follow-though

accepting issue for investigation.

Stephan,

I have contacted one of our engineers regarding this issue and have enclosed his
comments and explanation of the problem below.

Kathy

     Openoffice.org uses a branch of IZ which is essentially 
Bugzilla, and we're not adding functionality to it.  Upgrading to 
SourceCast would be the first step in this direction, though the 
current implementation makes similar moves to obscure the disabled 
user, rather than truly deleting them.

        That said, there is indeed a parameter that can be 
manipulated which allows administrators to remove accounts.  As a 
matter of policy, we decided to disable the interface to these 
parameters on the belief that a well-intentioned administrator would 
likely end up doing themselves more harm than good.  The parameter is 
'allowuserdeletion', it's set in issuezilla/data/params 
($::param{'allowuserdeletion'}), and from the IZ-provided explanation 
of the function:

"The pages to edit users can also let you delete a user. But there is 
no code that goes and cleans up any references to that user in other 
tables, so such deletions are kinda scary. So, you have to turn on 
this option before any such deletions will ever happen."

The new version of SourceCast handles user management differently (through
Helm), though this only permits the disabling and filtering of the user, since
the question of what to do with assigned bugs was never resolved.  I would
imagine that enabling the function and deleting the user would leave you in 
much the same state - floating bugs w/o owners.  Due to peculiarities 
in mysql, there is the possibility that a new user can come along and 
suddenly find themselves with a bunch of issues assigned that they've 
never heard of (remote, but possible).

The disabling strategy also give us a mechanism for re-instating a 
user and allowing them to retain any bugs that they might have been 
assigned, as opposed to having to re-assign each individual bug to 
the user.

Hope that helps.  If there's a change in IZ's future which needs to 
be introduced, let me know.

Stefan,

Appologies for the misspelling in the previous post.

Kat

Thanks for this detailed information (it's Niels speaking, isn't it :-).
I'm not urgently asking for a change in IssueZilla and see that removing
accounts leads to problems.
What I would like to see is that bugs can't be assigned to a user that has been
disabled to prevent even more dangling bugs. It's the responsibility of
Project/Team/... Leads to reassign old bugs from disabled to active users.
It would be nice if this could be implemented in upcoming releases of SC.

Actually another of our brilliant engineers, Kevin, but I see you recognize the
style ;-)

I will enter this as a feature request for upcoming versions of SourceCast.

Thank you 
Kathy

Hi,

Neils responded to this issue, his comments are listed below for dealing with
this issue in the current version.

Thank you
Kathy

just use issues/userprefs.cgi?bank=diffs

make sure "new email tech" is selected for the users that have been disabled
as well as the users that are taking over their issues.

then add the email addresses of users one wants to watch in the "Users to watch"
textfield.

As agreed by Louis I will close these resolved fixed kat (support)-owned issues
now. If you have trouble with that, please re-open the issue.

As agreed by Louis I will close these resolved fixed kat (support)-owned issues
now. If you have trouble with that, please re-open the issue.