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Using What to do with [bugs] questions now that version 9 is released? as a guideline Questions about bugs that have been fixed should have individual tags for each affected version. However this is impossible for longstanding bugs where there are many affected versions as a Question may only have five tags total, including .

Although we might arbitrarily choose not to use tags for versions past a certain age this diminishes information and requires future maintenance. We might arbitrarily tag for only the last 2 affected versions but I think this will be confusing; for example under that scheme these examples:

would mean that the first bug was fixed in version 9 and the second was fixed in version 10, however both might be present in version 7. (Or earlier.)

How can we best address this?

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    Would it be possible to search for bugs that are not fixed? E.g. search string "[bugs] -[fixed]".
    – Michael E2
    Aug 2, 2014 at 14:13
  • 1
    @MichaelE2 That's yet another consideration. Let me play with this. Edit: It seems that presently a search for [bugs] -[version*] finds non-version-tagged bugs.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 2, 2014 at 14:16
  • I have made this a featured question because implementing a new policy is going to be a significant undertaking and I seek a wide consensus.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 8, 2014 at 19:00
  • Recently we have a new bugs tag Version-10.1. Is that what we want? (Not sure whether to post as a comment here, a new Q, an answer here...)
    – Michael E2
    May 13, 2015 at 19:54
  • @MichaelE2 No, that's not what we want according to present consensus and active policy. A comment is fine but you can also raise a moderator flag next time for more certain attention.
    – Mr.Wizard
    May 14, 2015 at 2:20
  • If you agree that this is a useful endeavour, could you suggests the templates please? A couple of days ago Arnoud mentioned in chat that the ability to search for bugs by status would be very useful for him, which is why I think we should make a bit of an effort to sort and categorize bugs. All I'd really like is a post that contains a template (that I and others can refer to, I always forget what's customary even if I propose it, as you noticed...), plus just enough rules to make searching feasible.
    – Szabolcs
    Jul 24, 2015 at 19:46

4 Answers 4

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Tags should be used for categorization, not for giving additional information.

There are bugs which are present in all versions from 8-10, which already takes up 3 tags out of the 5 maximum. One more is taken up by , leaving only one more. Tagging for each version will force us to remove more useful tags from the question, which is bad.

Not tagging for all versions that are affected defeats the main purpose of tags: categorization. It won't be possible to search for questions with and and get all relevant bugs. At this point, the only remaining purpose of the tag is communicating information, which I think is misguided.

I propose not using tags for indicating the version any more, and keeping only .

Instead of using tags, I propose adding a line at the top of the question (for visibility), something like

Note: Fixed in version 10.0.1. Bug present in versions 8-9 and 10.0.0.

...

This communicates all the relevant information clearly and concisely, and doesn't use up any tags.

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    I considered and rejected this beforehand, but that doesn't mean I'm right. You raise a very good point that searching for version-9 bugs will not find a bug that is tagged fixed-in-10.0. Nevertheless removing all version tags from bugs would seem to be just as bad. What I think we need is a way to add meta-data to a post so that a search for e.g. version:9 would find all bugs relevant to version 9. Does that sound good to you, if it could be implemented?
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 1, 2014 at 19:04
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    Perhaps a tag fixed together with such a note would be helpful in searching.
    – Michael E2
    Aug 2, 2014 at 14:14
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    If there is a 5 tag maximum, then creating versioned tags is going to cause problems (What if a minor issue stays open in 6 or more versions? You would run out of tags)
    – Arnoud Buzing
    Jul 20, 2015 at 18:07
  • @ArnoudBuzing Exactly, that was one of my arguments for not using tags for this purpose.
    – Szabolcs
    Jul 20, 2015 at 18:15
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I second Szabolcs's proposal. But I think we can have a pre-defined template (e.g. a certain formated phrase). For every question with a tag, we can fill its metadata into the template and put it at the beginning of the question like

Bug Note: (introduced in 7.0) (fixed in 9.0.1)

so afterward we can search them as something like

body:"Bug Note:" body:"(fixed in 9" is:question [bugs]
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  • I think this could work but that is a lot to expect from everyone who is performing such a search. I think most people are not even aware of the search operators. Perhaps it is simply a matter of disseminating that information. I'll hold my vote until I've given this more thought.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 4, 2014 at 0:00
  • @Mr.Wizard I agree with you on this, but perhaps we can require something that is less strict but still possible for a computer to interpret, such as the word fixed appearing literally. Here's the proposal with proof-of-concept by Pickett.
    – Szabolcs
    Jul 24, 2015 at 19:50
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I propose introducing tags such as:

- -

In many cases I believe one of these would be sufficient and accurate. Often bugs first appear along with new functionality so it is apparent that e.g. a bug in Graph does not affect version 7.

Regressions are hopefully limited to one or two versions, therefore problems affecting only specific versions could be given individual version tags as they presently are.

Under this proposal mixing of and should be avoided. Either the bug should be assumed to affect all past versions wherein the functionality exists and the form be used, or it should be known to affect only certain versions and the forms be used.

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  • That's a reasonably efficient organization method.
    – rcollyer
    Aug 1, 2014 at 16:18
0

How about using two tags, one for the version in which the bug appeared and one for when it is fixed:

This makes it clear which versions are affected without having to specify each one.

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    This has the same problem as both other proposals: search won't work well. Otherwise it seems good. At the moment however I am inclined to either strip all the version tags (from bugs) as Szabolcs suggested or to see if the system operators will modify the software to extend the number of version tags that can be applied.
    – Mr.Wizard
    Aug 2, 2014 at 13:54

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