Maintaining and responding to issues for a project

Last updated on
17 September 2020

If you are the maintainer or co-maintainer of a software project (module, theme, or distribution), the maintainer of a Drupal core component, or the leader of other working group project, then part of you and your co-maintainers' responsibility is to maintain the issues related to your project or component. Others who are not formally maintainers can also contribute to the project by maintaining and responding to issues.

Here are some goals and responsibilities for issue maintenance (more details on some of them are in sections below):

  • Respond in a timely manner to new issues and issue updates
  • Be polite to all who post issues or comments, even if they seem angry rather than grateful. See Issue etiquette for more information.
  • Check for and close duplicate issues
  • Check for issue guidelines being followed
  • Check and fix issue settings and field values. See Project issue fields overview and linked pages for more information.
  • Update the title and/or issue summary for the issue, with better descriptions.
  • Verify that bug reports are valid, or ask for more information if they are unclear (if so, set the Status field to "postponed (maintainer needs more info)")
  • Answer support requests, or politely point users to other support options if your project does not provide support in issues (this is true of Drupal core, for example)
  • Make patches to fix bugs and add new features (if it is a software project)
  • Review others' patches in a constructive manner
  • Encourage others to contribute to the project -- they can do any of the above actions, even if they are not yet maintainers
  • Offer regular, skilled contributors the chance to become co-maintainers of the project

Verify the submission guidelines and issue fields

When a user creates an issue, they are presented with a link to the issue submission guidelines for the project the issue is in. Some issues use the default issues guidelines, which link to pages in this section about how to create issues. If your project has special issue guidelines, issue maintainers should familiarize themselves with them.

If someone submits an issue that does not conform to the guidelines, or doesn't have the right settings for Category, Status, or other fields, an issue maintainer can take one or more of the following actions:

  • Add a comment politely explaining what is wrong with the issue submission.
  • Add a link to the guidelines page for the project.
  • Add a link to one or more pages in this section that explain how to create a good issue.
  • Change the status to Postponed (maintainer needs more info) and ask for more information to be provided.
  • Change the status to Closed (won't fix) if the issue appears to be abusive, or is so broken that nothing can be salvaged.

Close duplicate issues

Users should do a search before they create an issue, to avoid creating duplicate issues. However, sometimes they do not. If you find that two issues are exact duplicates of each other:

  1. Check the issues over again to make sure they are actually duplicates. Sometimes, similar behavior can occur from two different causes. If two issues are similar but not exact duplicates, add a comment to both issues that links to the other issue, and on one of them, add the other issue as a Related issue in the Issue summary and relationships section.
  2. If the issues are actually duplicates, decide which one should be left open. The default answer to this is probably to choose the older issue, but sometimes the newer issue has more complete information, has been commented on more, has patches, etc.
  3. Close the less useful issue by changing its status to Closed (duplicate), and add the other issue as a Related issue in the Issue summary and relationships section. In the accompanying comment, add a note saying it's a duplicate of another issue.
  4. If there is some useful information or a patch in the less useful issue, add a comment to the more useful issue with that information. You can also attach patch files and update the issue summary if appropriate.

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