Accumulation of bugs on Malone

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 02:22:04AM -0400, 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.

First, be careful about the conclusions that you draw from this data; an
increase in the number of open bugs in Malone is not necessarily indicative
of an increase in the number of bugs present in Ubuntu.  There are
constantly more and more people using Ubuntu and reporting bugs, discovering
things that other users haven't noticed.  You should fully expect the number
of bug reports to increase dramatically immediately after the beta release,
even though Ubuntu will not have more bugs than it previously did.

Second, the core development team is now entirely focused on bug fixing for
Edgy, with feature freeze having begun a few weeks ago.  The MOTU team will
enter a similar phase after the beta release.  We have built into our
development cycle a time to fix bugs, and that time is already upon us.
This is our highest priority all the way through to the final release.

With those in mind, are a few ways to help reduce the actual number of bugs
in Ubuntu:

- Join the bug squad and help to respond to new bug reports, eliminate
  duplicates, prioritize bugs, analyze problems, etc.:
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingWithBugs

- Contribute patches which fix known bugs, if you are able

- Select a package which you care about, and take responsibility for
  forwarding bug reports upstream wherever applicable.  You can do this by
  registering the product in Launchpad, and making yourself a bug contact.

- Test the daily CD images:
  http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

-- 
 - mdz