From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Bug statistics Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:43:50 +0900 Message-ID: <87fx09n3qx.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <1focf1eb1p.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <87aaqjoe8b.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1277571098 3068 80.91.229.12 (26 Jun 2010 16:51:38 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:51:38 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: rms@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Jun 26 18:51:35 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OSYbO-0002bU-HB for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:51:34 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:38306 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1OSYbN-0002mg-TD for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:51:33 -0400 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=49654 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1OSYbF-0002kR-Hf for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:51:26 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OSYXl-0002vV-7L for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:47:50 -0400 Original-Received: from mtps02.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:49440) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OSYXk-0002vA-Mr; Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:47:49 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mtps02.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3B0357FFA; Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:47:44 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 6441112136B; Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:43:50 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM 8.0.12-devo-585 under 21.5 (beta29) "garbanzo" a03421eb562b XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6, seldom 2.4 (older, 4) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:126442 Archived-At: Richard Stallman writes: > > Amost 2000 bug reports not closed > > is rather disturbing. > > Not really. That's 2000 (minor) contributions to be grateful for, and > 2000 reasons for somebody new to volunteer to work on Emacs! > > Unless they mostly came in in the last few weeks, it means > we are lagging in fixing the bugs after other people report them. Sure. Get used to it. For a long time I thought XEmacs did a reasonable job of responding to bug reports. Then we got a tracker, which for the first time provided statistical information on what was actually happening. Pretty distressing. I think it is also the case that there are a lot more "drive-by" reports[1] on the tracker so it looks worse than it would have on the ML, even if we did have some way to get accurate stats for the ML. I know that several of our developers are sloppy about closing bugs on the tracker, too. I won't say Emacs devs are "sloppy", but I can think of a number of reasons why a fair number of bug fixes might not result in closing the corresponding bug, so it's possible that Emacs suffers from a slight bug count inflation for such reasons. OK, "we're Emacs and we should do better than this". Let's compare to a number of products that I consider quite robust whose projects provide public trackers. Having backlogs of open bugs on the same order of magnitude of the closed ones seems pretty consistent. This ratio is true of Python and Mailman. Here are the stats for everybody's favorite VCS which happened to be open on my desktop: Bugs in Bazaar Version Control System 4 New bugs 1905 Open bugs 70 In-progress bugs 0 Critical bugs 194 High importance bugs 177 Incomplete bugs (can expire) 26 Bugs with patches 13 Bugs fixed elsewhere 0 Open CVE bugs - CVE reports There appear to be 2440 bugs closed by developer action, supporting the approximate 1:1 ratio. This is a project which has, I believe, 5 developers paid to work on it to some extent, and another 3-5 core contributors with jobs at the same company in related projects (eg, working on Launchpad itself). Now, money isn't everything, but the Bazaar developers love their project as much as Emacs hackers love theirs, and several get paid to work on it on top of that. And *still* they have as many open bugs as Emacs does! Sure, you can and should try to reduce the number of open bugs in Emacs, but I think you're going to end up needing to accept 4-figure counts just like everybody else. Footnotes: [1] The report appears on the channel, but the reporter doesn't respond to requests for more information.