Proposal: Old Tickets Trac Triage Sessions

In a few months, we will celebrate the 20th anniversary of WordPress!

To mark the milestone, what could be better than taking a look at all of our old TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets?

This post aims to put together several bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrub sessions dedicated to old tickets that haunt the depths of Trac, the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. tool used for the development of WordPress.

To date, on Trac, we have for example:

Goal of the “Old Tickets Trac Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Sessions” initiative

The purpose of these sessions would be to take the oldest tickets, qualify them and move them forward according to their content or status.

Some tickets are probably no longer relevant today with the recent evolution of WordPress, in this case they must be closed as outdated (though this resolution status doesn’t exist in Trac for the moment)
Some tickets may require new discussions, this will be an opportunity to discuss them by adding new comments
Some tickets may be ready, but don’t have a patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. yet, we may be able to find people to take care of it and milestone them accordingly
Some tickets also probably have a patch (check for the has-patch workflow keyword), but this one needs to be refreshed (check for the needs-refresh workflow keyword). In that case we could find someone to take care of it and milestone them accordingly
Other tickets may have a patch ready to go (must be quite rare), in this case the idea would be to move them directly to the next milestones (WP 6.2 or 6.3)

How to participate?

Everyone is invited to contribute to this initiative. There could be several types of sessions:

“Classic” triage sessions on the SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. Make, coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. channel, where we would review tickets (read the dedicated post on the Core handbook: Leading a bug scrub)
Local triage sessions: local communities, or even companies, are welcome to organize an event to help move forward old tickets

During the meeting, the idea is to take one of the Trac reports listed at the beginning of this post and to go through each ticket.

What can I do to help move a ticket forward?

Depending on its status and progress, several types of contributions can help move a ticket forward:

Mark as close tickets that are no longer relevant. A Bug Gardener or a Component Maintainer will close it later
Extend the discussion to try to find how to move towards a resolution
Try to reproduce a bug that has not been reproduced yet, then share the steps of the reproduction procedure as well as screenshots or screencasts (when applicable)
Propose a patch, for tickets that do not yet have one, if the ticket is relevant and the existing discussion has resulted in a conclusion
Test existing patches and share screenshots or screencast (when applicable), using the test report template
Refresh an existing patch, if the ticket contains a patch that no longer applies to the current state of the WordPress source code

Some of these actions require a developer profile, others are accessible to anyone who knows enough WordPress and is able to run a test site.

Planned meetings

Let’s start with a first session on the Make Slack #core channel on Thursday, January 26, 2023 at 15:00 UTC. This session will last about 1 hour, and everyone is welcome!

If you are interested in hosting an “Old Tickets Trac Triage Session”, feel free to comment on this post!

For more info, read the dedicated post on the Core handbook: Leading a bug scrub.

Planned meetings, as confirmed,will be added to the list below:

Date	Location	Organizer
January 26, 2023 at 15:00 UTC	“Classic” triage session on Slack (core channel)	@audrasjb
February 9, 2023 at 15:00 UTC	“Classic” triage session on Slack (core channel)	@audrasjb
March 2, 2023 at 15:00 UTC	“Classic” triage session on Slack (core channel)	@audrasjb
March 23, 2023 at 15:00 UTC	“Classic” triage session on Slack (core channel)	@audrasjb
Another date	A location	Your name here!

This proposal is a follow-up to a discussion on Twitter with @defries and other WordPress contributors.

Props to @defries, @webcommsat and @costdev for proofreading.

#trac-cleanup, #triage, #wp20

Daniele Scasciafratte 5:24 pm on January 24, 2023

I am in!
I am already doing with my patches still waiting for years and in the past contributing to old tickets.
Added on my calendar to not forgetting as my usual.
Kingsley Felix 8:57 pm on January 30, 2023

WordPress importer 2.0 needs to be looked into.
Abha Thakor 9:44 pm on January 30, 2023

Requested for inclusion in the WordPress newsletters.
Andy Fragen 9:51 pm on February 8, 2023

I would love to see action on #22316. Testing should be very straightforward by using the feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. Plugin Dependencies
Olga Gleckler 7:00 am on April 15, 2023

Are we done with the Old TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. Tickets triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. sessions? I think that this is a wonderful initiative, and it can be continued further. There can be relatively simple issues which were overlooked or things that can finally be done, or that just deserve a second chance. I wonder if this triage sessions can be done with year by year (or a couple of years) tickets selections to make manageable chunks and not to go thought the same tickets over and over again.
Hareesh S 5:19 pm on May 19, 2023

I’d love to see this dedicated session for old ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. triaging continue. This would be a great opportunity to bring focus to many long-ignored issues. The contributors that have joined in the recent years might find these old tickets interesting and help resolve.