clean vs. crowded bug pages

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 12:31:59 +0100
bts

Marc Brockschmidt wrote the BTS is too crowded and Joey Hess objected that a too clean BTS can also be a bad sign.

I think both is true or to say better none of the ways makes sense without the other:

Bug reports are in my eyes one of the most valuable resources we have. No one can test everything even in almost trivial packages. To archive quality we need the users input and a badly worded bug report is still better than no bug report at all. Our BTS is a very successful tool in that as it lowers the barrier to report issues. No hassles to create (and wait for completion of) an account, no regrets by getting funny unparseable mails about some developer changing their e-mail addresses (did I already say I hate bugzilla?).

As those reports are valuable information, one should keep them as long as they can be useful. Looking at the description of the wontfix tag shows that even a request that cannot be or should not be fixed in the current context is considered valuable. Most programs and designs change, and having a place to document workarounds and keep in memory what open problems exist.

On the other hand a crowded bug list is like a fridge you only put food into. Over time it will start to degrade into the most displeasing form of a compost heap. The same holds for bug reports:

Most bugs are easier when they are young: You most probably have the same version as the submitter somewhere, know what changed recently and when you can reproduce it you get some hints on what is happening and get add it. If you cannot reproduce it, the submitter might still be reachable for more information.

When the report is old, things get harder. Is the bug still present? Was it fixed in between by some upstream release? Is the submitter still reachable and does still remember what happened?

When I care enough of a problem to write a bug report and trying to supply a patch for it, I try to always take a look at the bug list and look for some other low hanging fruits to pick and submit some other patch, too. (After all, most of the time is spend trying to understand the package and the strange build system upstream choose instead of plain old autotools and not when fix the problem). But when it is hard to see the trees because of all the dead wood around it, and there is nothing to find with some way to reproduce it and one knows far too well that the most efficient steps would be a tedious search for old versions to see if that was a bug solved upstream many years ago, good intentions tend to melt like ice thrown in lava.

So, when I wrote both is true I meant that keeping real-world issues documented and aware is a good thing. But having bugs rot (and often they do), will pervert all the advantages. In the worst case, people will even stop submitting new reports as it takes to long to look at all the old ones to look for a duplicate.