Assigning a bug to yourself should accept it

What if you assign the bug to someone else?

In that case you shouldn't be able to Accept it at all -- otherwise it's giving a misleading impression about whether the assignee actually wants to fix the bug.

Perhaps this can be represented as:
Status: [Open / Rejected / Pending Upload / Fixed]
(*) Assigned to [current assignee, possibly yourself]
( ) Accept yourself

Matthew, I guess it depends on what you mean by Accepted. I reassign bugs to myself to indicate that I take responsability for fixing them, though it may not necessarily happen immediately. I mark bugs as Accepted when I'm actually fixing them. Isn't that a reasonable use of the assignee and status fields?

I agree with Matthew here. If you assign the bug to yourself, you do indicate that you accept to fix the bug, even though it might not happen right away.

At the moment the Accept status is ambigous, for example it can mean either "I accept to fix the bug" or "OK, it's a confirmed bug". If it's the former, Matthew's suggestion is sound, only the assignee should be able to accept the bug. If it's the latter, we should rename it, as suggested in another bug report.

Personally I agree with Matthew, it's good to have a way of indicating that you will fix the bug if someone assigns it to you.

I think the status Accepted then is misnamed. Can we try and clarify together?

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 11:18:46PM -0000, Malone Bugtracker wrote:
> https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/malone/bugs/1346
>
> Christian "kiko" Reis <email address hidden> said:
>
> I think the status Accepted then is misnamed. Can we try and clarify
> together?

What would you suggest instead? With Matthew's workflow, I don't think
that it's misnamed.

"I reassign bugs to myself to indicate that I take responsability for fixing them, though it may not necessarily happen immediately."

That doesn't work, because you can't tell the difference between a bug that you've taken responsibility for, and a bug that someone else has assigned to you but that you're not interested in ever fixing. If that's not what the distinction between Assigned and Accepted should be for, I don't know why the distinction should exist at all.

Nobody has pointed out to me the purpose of the Accepted status. Right now I don't see its value given we have New and a nullable assignee. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

If you assign a bug to someone else, they might want to fix it, or they might not. I think Accepted means the assignee has Accepted reponsibility for fixing the bug, hence the name.

If so, then (1) assigning a bug to yourself should automatically make it Accepted (why would you assign a bug to yourself if you had no intention of fixing it?), (2) assigning a bug to anyone else should automatically make it not Accepted, and (3) nobody should be able to set Accepted on a bug they don't own. If Accepted means anything else, none of these things are true, and this bug is invalid.