Re: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding [LWN.net]

Re: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding

Posted Nov 25, 2005 19:29 UTC (Fri) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591)
Parent article: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding

I welcome this approach. The Debian team definitely needs some bugs squashed. The release-critical bug count alone is over 1300 bugs now, only about 300 of them with a patch. And with the ongoing library and gcc transitions this will not be an easy task.

Right now my biggest problem is to find the bugs I can (and want to) fix from this huge list. I usually run the rc-alert program which only displays release-critical bugs of packages I have installed. The rc-alert program is included in the devscripts package.

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Re: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding

Posted Nov 26, 2005 4:26 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Wow. Seriously, 1300 open release-critical bugs? That sounds just about unmanageable.

By contrast, Gentoo has 310 open bugs marked "critical" or "blocker". This is also more than would be ideal, but is the disparity simply a matter of the larger number of supported Debian architectures and/or packages? Or is there some more fundamental engineering problem here?

Re: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding

Posted Nov 26, 2005 8:00 UTC (Sat) by marineam (subscriber, #28387) [Link]

I wouldn't recomend paying much attention to the number of bugs Gentoo has marked as "critical" or "blocker". Differend devs use those flags differently if at all.

Re: Debian bug squashing can be rewarding

Posted Nov 27, 2005 4:42 UTC (Sun) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link]

Whether a package has a bug may have little in particular to do with Debian; if the bug was reported in Debian and not Gentoo (or whatever), it may be that nobody noticed/reported it for Gentoo. The 1300 "release critical bugs" means bugs that need to be fixed for the most recent version of a package to be released with the next version of Debian, but by no means does that in general imply the bug needs to be fixed before the next version of Debian can be released-- maybe an old version of the package will be released, or maybe that version of Debian will not have that package. Also, if it helps, the number of "Release-critical bugs concerning the next [Debian] release (excluding ignored and not-in-testing)" is 550 of the 1300.

Larry