Clarification about tickets with owner listed as “nobody”

Django Internals
1

Hi everyone,

I’m going through Django Trac tickets and wanted a small clarification. I see many tickets where the Owner field is set to “nobody”, even though the ticket is Accepted and sometimes has prior patches.

Just to confirm my understanding: does “nobody” simply mean the ticket is currently unassigned and open for contributors to work on? Or are there cases where such tickets are implicitly “owned” despite showing nobody?

I want to make sure I’m not stepping on anyone’s work before picking one up.

Thanks!

2

Good question! “nobody” is equivalent to no owner or blank. That said, you should always read the ticket and peruse prior patches, and usually this reveals whether there is an active, implicit owner. In that case you could politely nudge the implicit owner to make that explicit. (Or, after waiting a few weeks and hearing no complaint, reassigning it.)

In terms of judging whether someone is active, I tend to wait at least for 2-4 weeks of silence in reply to simple “are you still there?” queries, and ~6 months for reply to code review, since it often takes our limited community of reviewers that long to leave a review.

Misunderstandings happen, my advice is to just over-communicate before investing the bulk of your effort.

Hope that helps!

1 Like
3

Thanks, that clears it up — appreciate the guidance!!