What don't you switch to GitHub issues

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 06:39:24AM +0000, Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> In the meantime, you could help reduce the pile by picking a bug to fix
> today. Multiple people, particularly those concerned about the number of old
> issues still open, who donate one or two days a month to fixing old bugs
> could go along way. The same goes for reviewing PRs.
[...]

Back when I had more free time, I used to trawl bugzilla for
low-numbered bugs to find low-hanging fruit to fix. It's not hard to
setup various prebaked custom queries that allow me to, for example,
find all bugs 1 month / 2 months / 1 year / 2-5 years old with just one
mouse click. Bugzilla is actually highly configurable and can be made to
do quite useful things, as long as people get past the fallacious
preconception that no eye candy == lousy. Over time, at least while I
was active, I have noticed that the number of trivial bugs has shrunk
significantly, and most of the lingering old issues are the ones that
are actually very difficult to fix. So the talk about stuff rotting in
bugzilla and forgotten is mostly unfounded speculation of people who
haven't even bothered to look deeper than the superficial appeatance,
rather than a reflection of reality.

Nowadays I've less time to trawl through bugzilla but every now and then
an issue comes up that can be fixed in the few spare minutes that I
have, and I still try to contribute when I can.  And I've noticed that
the number of bugs fixed per release seems to have increased, so
progress *is* being made in this area. What's lacking right now is more
people to direct more energy to fixing bugs and reviewing PRs rather
than wasting that energy complaining in the forums. For the sheer amount
of energy spent arguing on the forum, so many more bugs could have been
fixed, and so many more PRs reviewed. We don't even require you to have
commit access in order to be able to give useful feedback to a PR. I
don't know how much lower the barrier can get. Heck, *I* got commit
access because I was actively submitting and reviewing Phobos PRs as a
non-committer. It all comes down to who's doing the actual work vs.
who's just telling others what they think they should be doing, which
rarely, if ever, works.


T

-- 
Don't get stuck in a closet---wear yourself out.