Automatic bug expiry working again

Back in February, Martin wrote that we’d re-enabled Launchpad’s bug expiry feature. This meant that, if a project had enabled bug expiry, Incomplete bugs that appeared to be abandoned would be automatically marked Expired after 60 days.

This worked for a while and then broke. Normally, our monitoring scripts would have have alerted us to the problem but, by an unfortunate coincidence, a separate bug meant that the alert for bug expiry was also broken.

Both bugs are now fixed and bug expiry is working again. Shortly after the fix went live, Launchpad expired roughly 2,000 bugs that would have expired anyway over the past few months.
The option to enable bug expiry for a project

From now on, Launchpad will expire bugs in the usual way. A bug is a candidate for expiry 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.

If you run a project and you’d previously had bug expiry set to on, but have decided you no longer want it, follow the Configure bug tracker link on your project’s bug overview page and then de-select the Expire “Incomplete” bug reports when they become inactive check-box.

2 Responses to “Automatic bug expiry working again”

  1. Brian Murray Says:

    I thought there was also a check regarding the status in other 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 instances where the project or distribution has not disabled bug expiry. However, the bug will be removed entirely from the bug expiry process as soon as one of those communities marks it as confirmed.”

    From https://help.launchpad.net/BugExpiry

    Is that wiki page incorrect?

  2. Deryck Hodge Says:

    The help page is correct. We won’t expire if another task is active.

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