Accumulation of bugs on Malone

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Saturday 23 September 2006 1:22 am, Saad Shakhshir wrote:
> Looking through the list of bugs on Malone, there are a couple of hundred
> that are designated as being high priority and confirmed.  Clearly more
> bugs are opened every day than are closed.  What's the long-term strategy
> for this?  If there isn't one it would make sense to take a 6-month stretch
> to iron out these high-priority bugs without introducing new features so as
> to reduce the amount of backlog.  A good number of the bugs aren't
> necessarily upstream bugs and if they are then a close collaboration with
> upstream to get them squashed would be beneficial to us all.  Otherwise
> they will just continue to accumulate.

This is an unscientific guess, but I think it's a good one: that the increase 
in the number of bug reports could be tied more closely to the increase in 
our userbase, causing ever more obscure bugs to be discovered and reported, 
than to the number of new problems.

There is also the issue that Ubuntu tends to lean toward the cutting edge side 
of the stability-vs-cutting-edge spectrum, and even more so with "edgy".  
That puts us somewhat on the forefront of new software and therefore new 
bugs.  We could turn off the new-feature spigot for a release or two and put 
our resources into fixing bugs, but we would alienate an awful lot of users 
who insist on getting new software, and when we caught back up we'd still be 
in the same place - full of new software with all its bugs, only with fewer 
users.

Rocco