Re: On Bugs

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Anthony Towns wrote:
> Making it clearer what bugs are "important" will help making releases,
> but I don't *think* there's much chance that it'll really help with the
> total bug count. Maybe I'm wrong. Would someone care to have a quick
> skim through some random packages' bug reports and see what proportion
> of them can be marked fixed or closed?

FWIW, I recently reviewed evey open bug report I have ever submitted. I
was able to close about 10% of them right off as no longer reproducable,
already fixed but not closed, filed against packages that no longer
exist, and so on. (I close some more of that type with this message.)

Another 10% of them should have been fixed within days of my filing the
report, but have not been looked at for years, which made this review 
pretty stressful.

My conclusion is, if we want to cut down on the bug count by 20 percent,
all we have to do is close bugs that have been accidentially left open, and
do trivial NMU's. Of course this is dependant on my bug reporting habits
being typical, and to be honest, I have a penchant for filing really
trivial nitpicky bugs that are easy to fix (and easy to ignore).

-- 
see shy jo