Re: More bug fixing needed

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos at systemhalted dot org>]

On 8/30/2012 8:02 AM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> The number of open glibc bugs has been increasing over the past few 
> months.  There are various possible reasons for this:
> 
> * People not closing bugs when they fix them.  Patches have recently been 
> checked in for bugs 14476 and 14516, for example, but those bugs are still 
> open.  If you've checked in patches for any bugs lately, and the patches 
> completely fix the bugs (rather than only some cases), please make sure 
> that you've marked those bugs as RESOLVED/FIXED, with reference to the 
> relevant commit.  The responsibilities of a patch committer include both 
> adding fixed bug numbers to NEWS and closing the bugs themselves.

This would imply we are actually closing a lot of bugs, which we aren't IMO.
 
> * People being more willing now to file any bugs found, or cleanups where 
> it's agreed that a change is desired and there is a clear well-defined 
> completion criterion, in Bugzilla (rather than just in private todo list, 
> or complaining about the bugs elsewhere without actually reporting them).  
> This is good, but with more active bug reporters we need more active bug 
> fixing.

This is part of the issue, and that's a good thing.

> * Many of the easier old bugs having been fixed in 2.16, so bugs that are 
> left tend to be harder to fix.

This is true for quite a few of the bugs.

I find that glibc bugs are easy to find and hard to fix because of the
conservative nature of the project with regards to compatibility, and
that's just a burden we have to bear.

> * Development generally being less active at this time of year.

This is also true.

> However, ultimately we simply need more people fixing more bugs to get the 
> number down.  My guess is that probably no more than 100 of the 498 open 
> bugs are actually hard in the sense of involving difficult design issues, 
> difficult questions as to whether the requested change is actually 
> desirable or more than a few hours' work to fix the bug.  Bug fixing is a 
> good way to learn more about and get involved in different areas of glibc.  
> If everyone of the listed people with commit access were to fix 14 of the 
> existing open bugs, they'd all be resolved (although quite a few of those 
> people are inactive, I think some more people have had commit access added 
> over the past few months without necessarily updating the MAINTAINERS wiki 
> page, and you don't need commit access to fix bugs).  If everyone with 
> commit access were to fix just 3 of the existing open bugs, there would be 
> fewer than 400 left, which would be clear progress.

I agree. Hopefully my review last night of Jeff Law's locale changes will
close out one more bug.

One thing we might do is have a bug triage day and time. Say Thursday afternoon
we get together on IRC at a particular time and do a group triage, talk about
the bugs and work through N bugs in 30 minutes.

I think this would help get us into the habit of doing triage.

Comments?

Cheers,
Carlos.