Re: Bug statistics

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

On Thursday 24 June 2010 17:40:50 Richard Stallman wrote:

Hi Richard,

>     4594 reports  [1]
>     2647 closed reports
> 
> Amost 2000 bug reports not closed
> is rather disturbing.
> 
>     14% have been marked "minor"
>     20% have been marked "wishlist"
>     9% are tagged "moreinfo"
>     5% are tagged "wontfix".
> 
> That is about 40%.  It seems to imply there are around 1200 bug
> reports which are not marked in these ways, and not fixed either.
> Is that true?

Statistics never lie. ;-)

I guess, that there are quite a lot duplicate bug reports.  The problem
with M-x report-emacs-bug is that a bug gets filed unconditionally.
With web-based bugtrackers, after entering the bug summary the whole
database is searched for similar reports and that list is presended to
the user.  Then she can decide if it's really a new, unknown bug.  If
not, she can simply append additional information to an existing bug.

As a poor man's solution, I'd suggest to add some text to the beginning
of the bug report email M-x report-emacs-bug is creating, which asks the
user to first search the existing bugs at

  http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?package=emacs

before filing a new one.  (And maybe, there should be information how to
change the "To:" in the mail, so that the report will be appended to the
existing report if there is any.)

Bye,
Tassilo