bug db cleanup time

Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from December 2000

Thread Previous | Thread Next

From:

Jarkko Hietaniemi

Date:

December 6, 2000 15:09

Subject:

bug db cleanup time

Message ID:

20001206170939.C22696@chaos.wustl.edu

Thanks to many volunteers the number of open bugs in the bug db
(http://bugs.perl.org/) has dropped to around one thousand.
Which is nice and certainly better than, say, two thousand.

I think we can easily cut the number of the open bugs by several
hundreds in very short time, though.

The problem are the bugs in the bug process, I think... what I mean
is that once a bug has been submitted there is no automatic periodic
feedback back from us to the bug submitter.

A bug may easily be lost in the shuffle: the bug may be so esoteric
that right then no one has anything bright to comment, or someone who
would know is at that moment too busy to answer, or whatever.  What
would be nice is some sort of periodic automatic polling back to the
submitter: has the bug been addressed/resolved?  Did anyone human ever
reply to you?  Have you in the meanwhile found anything related to the
bug, possibly found a workaround or created a patch?  Also, there is
no guarantee that when a bug gets fixed the report gets closed.
I *try* to do that but I'm fully fallible.

As a result of these deficiencies there are now numerous open "Not OK"
message accumulated during the 5.7 (and even 5.6) development cycles.
I do appreciate them, I really do, but the open bugs report also bother
me a lot, they really do.

Now, in the short term, what I would dearly like to see is that those
who see this message and know that they have submitted "Not OK"
messages would in the past, would go to the bug db website, and search
for any of their open bugs.  Select Search, Status open, Source addr
something that matches your email adddress, and hit "query".  Which of
the resulting bug reports can be closed?  Send the ids of the clearly
obsolete ones directly to me, I'll close them (or, if you happen to
have bug db admin rights, you can close them yourself...)  If any of
the open ones have mutated since you submitted them, please close
the old ones and submit fresh ones.  If any of them are really still
acute, please try to investigate further, ask p5p for help if needed.

While you are at it, you could try drilling down the list of 'high'
and 'medium' severity bugs.  If you see something that you know has
been fixed, either in 5.7, 5.6, or even earlier, don't hesitate to do
something about closing the bug.  If you start feeling that being bug
db admin would be a neat thing, ask richard@perl.org for admin rights.

In the long term: any further ideas on the bug fixing cycle and its
problems are welcome.  One idea I have would be to arrange 'bug
interest lists', mailing lists that would automatically receive for
example bugs on a platform X.

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen

Thread Previous | Thread Next