Merging unrelated Jira issues is a bad idea.

Merging unrelated Jira issues is a bad idea.

Folks have taken to merging Jira issues made by separate people, that concern completely unrelated matters, into one proposal.

This unwise practice eliminates the ability for people to express their support or lack of support for separate, distinct, unrelated ideas by voting for some of the ideas and not voting for the other ideas which have been included in the merged issue.

Any unrelated issues that have been merged together in this fashion should be reopened separately, to gain votes or not, on their own individual merits, as their individual authors intended.

A permanent end should be made to the practice of merging unrelated ideas into one Jira issue.

Agreed. It's the same tactic Congress uses to get Bullshit Bills passed by tacking them on to important issues. Can a JIRA issue be made on another JIRA issue?

So the way things stand, *anybody* (not just Lindens) can merge issues? That's just asking for trouble.

I have almost given up on Jira. I've had people come in, on a very well documented reports of my own, change it's title to reflect a different OS, and practically destroy it, when it was clearly and precisely documented what OS I was using, had screen shots of my issues etc attached... and it got renamed, CLOSED, and then attached to something unrelated as a dupe! Made no sense and after digging around that said same person had been doing it to quite a few others.

Sorry, Windows ≠ Linux as the fool who did it to my issues had relabeled them as. I think it's time for some editing controls to be put in place and the free for all to end...

Yes, as well as edit the original issue, etc.

Not saying that this doesn't happen or that it's a good thing.

Sometimes, OTOH, I see multiple JIRAs for different symptoms of the same issue. Somebody says "X happened!" and somebody else says "Y happened!" but they're both just symptoms of some underlying problem and the issues get merged.

In this particular case, I don't see it as a bad thing. Other cases: bad thing.

Also, I tend to get annoyed with non-LL people chaning things to "won't fix" because they don't like the idea or think that it can't be done.

Agreed. I'm trying to find a good way to manage meta-issues atm, I'm sticking to looking for issues which are definitely unrelated, and commenting on ones which I'm not sure are feasible or entirely relevant, and posting a comment in the meta-issue saying what I do and why (so someone can dispute it or so if I've been over-zealous/unfair).

But merging unrelated issues doesn't help any, if the merged issue gets loads of votes, then LL have to pore over comments in order to work out what people ACTUALLY want from the issue so they can ignore superfluous parts. But how then do they signifiy this has been done? They can't just close/resolve it as that would indicate they did ALL of it which they may not have the resources to do.

Such practises are just messy and stupid, as Meade rightly says, it's only of use for genuinely duplicate bugs with differing symptoms reported.

One thing that annoys me about the JIRA is there seems to be no notification of when things happen to issues you posted, or which you are interested in. Like I had one of mine closed recently with a comment that seemed to have completely misunderstood the problem, but the "My unresolved issues" filter (which I usually use to give a nice overview of things I still want) doesn't show it.

Okay, I think I've spoken about more than just merging


Also, Suzeanne, I noticed a comment by you: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-305
In this you're referring to a meta-issue as a 'merged' issue. I hope that isn't what you're referring to? Meta-issues provide a way of grouping issues that is not really suitable for a category. My examples are to group features for privacy, for performance and for small improvements. However, the purpose for these is two-fold, as you'll note performance _is_ a category, but the thing that the meta-issue provides also (hopefully) is a way for people to express a desire to have the meta-issue's topic given greater weight.

To clarify, the improve performance meta-issue allows people to simply say "Yes, I want better performance" and as a result hopefully get more attention by the Lindens to this area. It then also uses the links to provide quick access to a number of features which may help to do this (multi-threading, caching etc.).

If issues linked to them are unrelated then chances are someone has linked it in error, or an attempt to get attention for a feature that does not support the meta issue. Currently I'm trying to keep my own meta-issues tidy, and hope others do the same, but they are a good way for the Lindens to see "Oh, 18 people are voting to improve performance, perhaps we should take a look at some of the ways they think this can be done, or investigate some of our own". And similar for many of the other good meta-issues.