How many bugs have you fixed today?
That is the sledgehammer argument people bring up when others dare to criticize the current release process.
I think this question is nonsense. While the bug-fix rate was more or less the same since the last two releases, it looks like in this release we simply started the freeze with much more open RC-bugs than before (~3 times more RC-bugs than with Etch). So it was foreseeable that the freeze would take longer this time. We can’t solve the problem by trying to fix bugs faster, we’ve tried it several times with mediocre success. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep up fixing bugs, but we should probably accept that a certain number of people can only fix a certain number of bugs in a given time. In our case roughly 30 RC-bugs per month.
So what’s the point of asking how many RC-bugs one has fixed? Does that mean only those are allowed to make suggestions, who fixed an RC bug? That pressure doesn’t help anyone. I believe unstable being frozen for several months is a very important problem which can have drastic consequences regarding the number of our users, and we will not solve it by suggesting to fix our bugs faster.
Tags: debian
December 16th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
The point is that your posts are annoying and your contributions to the release process, whether in acts (fixing bugs) or in suggestions and discussions, have been worthless until now.
December 16th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
That is by the way one of the guys who loves to come up with the classic “How many bugs have you fixed today”: http://blog.venthur.de/2008/12/09/lennys-release-date-iii/#comment-117185
December 16th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
It’s not that I like to come up with such arguments; I know I could have fixed more of them myself. But with the time you invest in criticizing the release process and complicating the work of other developers with reportbug-ng, your contribution to the release process negative. That doesn’t make people likely to listen to your proposals about helping it.
January 5th, 2009 at 2:05 am
“We can’t solve the problem by trying to fix bugs faster, we’ve tried it several times with mediocre success. [...] In our case roughly 30 RC-bugs per month.”
This is incorrect. Looking through the historical data you will see in that in the linear region of each successive freeze (the bit that you extrapolated out to June 2009 for lenny’s release), that the sarge release was at around 0.6 bugs per day being fixed, etch was 1.1 bugs/day and lenny is currently 2.0.
If tripling the rate of bug squashing is only modest success, then you’re a hard one to please indeed.
December 24th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
[...] Venthur: How many bugs have you fixed today? It’s easy to criticize the software release process. I know I’m guilty of doing it when [...]