It's a genuine question because I'm puzzled here.
A very small number of users have this bug (and tbf, it's a really bad bug), and are unable to consistently reproduce it and it seems none of the developers have been able to (the seemingly random nature of the bug occurring is not helping). How is it supposed to be fixed?
Said another way - If they can't reproduce it, they can't close it.
They may well have fixed it already, but without a way to reproduce it the only prudent behavior is to leave it open and wait for the next diagnostic file to be uploaded.
Now re-answer the above questions with these assumptions.
- How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
- How do you *close* a bug report when you can't reproduce?
Would some noble purpose be served by closing the existing issue in the hope that they'll complain via more official channels?
So yeah, I do think more user reports can help. At worse, it will make them take it more seriously if there are more reports.
You also are falling to observation bias. You can see linked in the issue as well as by searching that there are similar issues that were resolved and marked solved. So I don't think they were just doing nothing as everyone seems to be assuming.
> There's no sense keeping it open unless there are ongoing reports of the issue.
Let's consider this from a failure analysis standpoint. Here's our options
- You have incorrectly marked issue as solved
- You have incorrectly left the issue marked as unsolved
The classic example of this design choice is with a safe. Let's imagine you are building a safe. If the safe fails, would you prefer that it fails into a state that is unlocked or into a state that is locked? The answer isn't so obvious, as it actually depends on how it fails, right?
A very common example is when designing skyscrapers. The choice is that when a skyscraper fails, there is a strong preference that it falls in on itself (think 9/11). Why? Because if it falls to the side then it takes out other buildings and can create a chain reaction (a related famous example being housing in Industrial Revolution London and fire...)
Your action is a valid option, but it is not the option that I would chose. I think what they did was perfectly fine. They left it open (to avoid tricking anyone to thinking it is solved when the status of solved is actually unknown) and marked with additional information about lack of verification/reproducibility. Essentially, it is marked as stale.
So we're back to the earlier question:
- How do you *close* a bug report when you can't reproduce?
- You can extend logging to gather additional information to reproduce it.
- You can try to reason about the code and figure out possible causes.
- You can attempt to formally verify the correctness of the code.
- You can put guards into the code against unexpected states and actions.
- You can verify the correct result of previous actions before any destructive actions.
- If all fails you can scrap the piece of code in question since it seems to be beyond your ability to maintain.
You strangle it from the edges.