Bug trackers and kernel development [LWN.net]

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 2:00 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305)
Parent article: Bug trackers and kernel development

I think bug databases work well for commerical software. Creating, tracking, and fixing bugs are various people's jobs.

I don't think bug databases work well with open source projects, but I'm not sure why. Maybe the signal to noise ratio is too low when your bug database is world-writable for thousands of helpless or malicious users.

I've reported a couple GNOME bugs in the GNOME Bugzilla. After a couple months of inactivity, another user might add a "me too" comment. Then the bug is never fixed. I know other people have had this same complaint.

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Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 3:30 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

The GNOME tracker is hugely useful to GNOME, though, and the GNOME developers will tell you so if you ask. In fact there's an OLS talk about GNOME experiences with bugzilla that hopefully some of the kernel hackers will attend, Luis knows his stuff.

Some large percentage of bugs are simply never going to make it to the top of the core developers's priority queue; some other problem is always larger. From time to time new developers appear and fix a block of these, which makes tracking them worthwhile.

Often they just sit in the bug tracker, but this is a problem with software in general, not with the tracker; not enough developers to fix all the bugs. The bug tracker makes you face facts. ;-) Still, having the bugs there in case developers appear turns out to be handy sometimes.

There are a lot of bugs that do make it to the top of the core maintainers' queue, and they are very useful to track. Generally speaking, if a bug isn't closed within a month or two it's probably going to sit there for a long time, but many bugs do get closed quickly.

When releasing a large coordinated-among-many-people project you want to track release showstoppers, this is one of the most useful aspects of bug tracking. Otherwise you can't ever know what work remains before you are ready to release, and you can't focus a group of people on the remaining work.

Having used a bug tracker for years for large open source projects, I don't think it's accurate to say that if a bug is important it will be reported over and over. Often very serious bugs are only reported once or twice with no reporter followup, *especially* if the bug is in a library or the kernel where regular users will suffer from the bug but not really be able to track it down or report it. So I would say that very serious bugs do slip through the cracks if they aren't tracked.

GNOME has a process for making regular stable releases on schedule every 6 months, not a lot of other projects can say that, and the nice thing is that it seems to improve rate of innovation/change at the same time. Bugzilla is a big part of what makes the process work.

One thing to consider is that bug triagers can often separate the high priority bugs from the ones that would never make it to the top of the pile, so developers need not ever see the "bug tracker cruft" - there are a lot of nondeveloper bug triagers helping out with GNOME and Mozilla.

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 9:10 UTC (Thu) by minichaz (subscriber, #630) [Link]

I would be willing to be a "bug triager" for a project. I've just graduated in Computer Science and, while I'm not a good C programmer yet (taught Java at university and learning C now), I think this could be a good way to get involved in a project and get started in FOSS development.

Any projects out there looking for a triager?

I'm pretty handy with GNU/Linux, I'm really interested in the Linux kernel and have done a bit of kernel hacking for my third year university project (designing and implementing a steganographically encrypted filesystem: I ran out of time so it is very much a work in progress).

Thanks

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 12:00 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Yes please, Debian would love to have you on board.

Debian has been using a centralised bug-tracker for years and it's very
useful for keeping track of a great deal of otherwise-disparate
information; not just bugs, but info like the fact that someone is
working on packaging a bit of software but it's not uploaded yet (to
avoid accidental duplication of effort).

It also make us painfully aware of the number of release-critical bugs we
currently have and need to fix before we can release. We'd like to be
heading for a release right now but the RC bug count is relentlessly
climbing past 1000. More people working on fixing them would be very
welcome. Some bugs are really hard because you get tied up in package
dependencies and working out exactly what to fix where (and we have a
team of experts for the hard stuff which you can defer to), but many are
easy and simply require someone to recompile an app with a newer compiler
or fix some trivial thing and do a new upload.

It's hard to get people to concentrate on this work so we'd love to have
anyone on board who is interested. You don't need to become a debian
developer to help out, although it will help with some tasks.

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 18, 2003 12:44 UTC (Fri) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]

I would be willing to be a "bug triager" for a project.

Not wanting to compete with the Debian guy :-), but The Mozilla project, in its new shiny independent form, would love to have your help also.

Gerv

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 16:46 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

btw, I have reported a few bugs in the FreeBSD bug database. They were all fixed or proven to be "by design" behaviour within a couple weeks. My GNOME bugs have received no attention what so ever for the past six months.

JWZ describes his experience reporting GNOME bugs as follows (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/154529.html):

Today a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported to the Gnome propellerheads in the last couple of years were closed as follows:

Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If y0u feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks... This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers" model.

Bug trackers and kernel development

Posted Jul 17, 2003 16:59 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

jwz whines a lot. All his issues have been fixed, just not backported to GNOME 1.4. No volunteers or companies have shown interest in still supporting 1.4, so it isn't happening. Equivalent of expecting kernel 2.6 features in kernel 2.0.