Bug backlog - now and future. Some proposals.

[Jon Stanley]

First, let me apologize for not answering for a week.  This is not an
account that I generally watch (though I should have subscribed from
the account that I *do* watch in order to post this - my fault
entirely).  For the record, the account that I do watch is jonstanley
AT <google's popular mail service>.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:

>  I would suggest that the time to fix them is now, *instead* of a
>  release. To clear the backlog by *fixing* the bugs, not by writing
>  clever scripts to mark them CLOSED:WONTFIX or send notes to bug
>  submitters to update the version to keep the bug open (unfixed) for
>  another two releases.

That would be the ideal solution.  The problem is that with the pace
of Fedora releases, with an older bug, we can't be sure that the
reported issue has actually been fixed without any action on the part
of the maintainer.  Fedora frequently re-bases applications to current
upstream releases, where a lot of work goes on.  There is simply not
the manpower to determine if the reported problem actually still
exists or not.

>  I read them, and I find lots of ways to make unfixed bugs exit bugzilla,
>  but no indication that bugs will actually be fixed in a more timely fashion.

Unfortunately, as a triage community, I don't think that we're in a
place to do that.  We think that what reporters really want is a human
to acknowledge that they have reported a bug and there's a human on
the other end that has evaluated it.  To that end, I encourage
everyone to become involved in the BugZappers project - anyone can do
it.  See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers for more.

>  I think you need a "deadline scheduler" approach, if a bug in a package
>  isn't fixed by some (reasonable) time after it's reported, it should be
>  evaluated, and unless it's waiting on external info it should be marked
>  as TRIVIAL, AVOIDABLE, or RECOVERABLE (all FIXLATER), or mark the
>  package as UNMAINTAINED. Then release the UNMAINTAINED packages as a
>  separate group in the next release, the way "extras" used to be.

This is in theory a great idea.  I don't think that we're to that
point - yet.  I just ran a report for bugs that were created in
January (in February we had the GCC 4.3 rebuild that would skew
numbers a bit).  There were 1956 bugs reported against all versions of
Fedora, 1219 of which are currently closed - that;s 62% of them that
are fully dealt with.  Seems like a good percentage to me.  However,
we also have 468 bugs from that time period that are in NEW that need
some love.

>  In other words, if the package is still usable by most users, document
>  the bug as trivial and live with it, and if a major bug isn't fixed, the
>  reason doesn't matter. Developers enjoy adding new features more than
>  bug fixing, or become too busy to maintain. Good intentions are nice,
>  but they don't buy you a beer.

There's the old saying "don't attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence".  It's a well known fact that in Fedora,
many of our package maintainers are *not* developers - they rely on
upstream  to actually fix any bugs that may exist (as should happen -
all of our work should happen upstream - whether the Fedora maintainer
actually *does* the work upstream is irrelevant).