Overview

While we all have the best of intentions to at least triage every bug that is reported against a project we're involved with, there are just some bugs that never get looked at.

Rather than allowing stale bugs to clutter your project's bugs list, Launchpad offers you a pragmatic way of dealing with moribund bugs: old, unattended bugs that have the Incomplete status are expired.

This gives you three benefits:

• you can view a report of all bugs that are due to expiry and so deal with any that need your attention
• once the bug's expired, Launchpad notifies all subscribers, which may prompt someone to clarify the report or otherwise deal with the bug
• it removes stale bugs from your bug lists.

Launchpad also places a message on the report page of any bug that's due to expire.

Disabling bug expiry

Bug expiry is automatically enabled when you mark your project as using Launchpad to track its bugs. However, if bug expiry doesn't suit your project, visit "https://launchpad.net/<yourproject>/+edit" to disable it.

Old, unattended and incomplete?

Launchpad consider bugs ready for expiry if it appears that they have been abandoned. It considers a bug to be abandoned if:

• it has the "Incomplete" status
• the last update was more than 60 days ago
• it is not marked as a duplicate of another bug
• it has not been assigned to anyone
• it is not targeted to a milestone.

Only projects and distributions that use Launchpad as their bug tracker and that have not disabled bug expiry are part of the bug expiration process.

Bugs watched in external trackers are never candidates for expiry.

Bugs that affect several projects

Bugs tracked in Launchpad can affect several communities (projects or distributions) and each community has its own status for that bug.

Launchpad will consider these bugs for expiry only in those projects or distributions that have chosen to use bug expiry. However, the bug will be removed from the bug expiry process entirely as soon as one of those communities marks it as confirmed.

Next step

Now you can start using Launchpad to manage your project's bugs. Let's take a look at a concept that's unique to Launchpad, multi-project bugs.