Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 371
Issues can be assigned to outdated accounts
Last modified: 2003-12-27 10:23:17 UTC
In Issuezilla accounts can't be deleted, but only disabled. Issues can be assigned to disabled accounts. There seems to be no mean to avoid usage of outdated accounts.
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.