The Lifecycle of LibreOffice Bugs

As developer of Gnumeric, during the interoperability testing of new Gnumeric features I often encounter LibreOffice bugs. In the past I tried to report all such bugs to LibreOffice since I would appreciate similar service from the LibreOffice developers. Over time I have come to recognize that the typical lifecycle of a LibreOffice bug differs greatly from that of a Gnumeric bug:

  1. Bug reporter files a bug report with all neccessary information.
  2. Optionally a significant amount of time later the bug is closed or requests more info since the LO developer looking at the report does not know of the existence of an ODF specification and is unable to look into the ODF file without opening it in LibreOffice.
  3. Optionally another person realizes that the bug as reported is in fact valid and the report complete.
  4. The bug is ignored for 6 months to one year.
  5. The bug status is changed to NEEDINFO with the following (or similar) notation added:

    "This bug was filed before the changes to Bugzilla on 2011-10-16. Thus it
    started right out as NEW without ever being explicitly confirmed. The bug is
    changed to state NEEDINFO for this reason. To move this bug from NEEDINFO back
    to NEW please check if the bug still persists with the 3.5.0 beta1 or beta2
    prereleases.
    Details on how to test the 3.5.0 beta1 can be found at:
    http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHunting_Session_3.5.0.-1
    more detail on this bulk operation:
    http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/RFC-Operation-Spamzilla-tp3607474p3607474.html"

  6. Half a year later the bug is closed with the notation:

    "Due to the fact, that there are a lot of NEEDINFO bugs with no answer within
    the last six months, we close all of these bugs.
    To keep this message short, more infos are available @
    https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/NeedinfoClosure#Statement
    Thanks for understanding and hopefully updating your bug, so that everything is
    prepared for developers to fix your problem."

Of course the problem at hand wasn't really my problem but LibreOffice's problem.

I guess in future I will save myself lots of time by not filing these bug reports in the first place.

Just for reference, the following are example bugs that have this or a similar life cycle: