[dmd-internals] Oldest five bugs

[Don Clugston]

On 18 January 2012 22:48, Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei at erdani.com> wrote:
> On 1/18/12 3:41 PM, Don Clugston wrote:
>>
>>  From 5 years 8 months to 5 years 6 months. I don't think we get much
>> leverage from that.
>
>
> We must start somewhere, and with time the "de-aging" process will
> accelerate. Without giving old bugs due process, we undermine people's
> confidence that we're thorough and that every bug will be ultimately looked
> at.

Do you have any evidence for that?

Internal compiler errors definitely erode confidence. Wrong code bugs
erode confidence.
Bugs that have high number of votes yet remain unfixed erode confidence.

There are plenty of newsgroup posts expressing that. But not about the
age of bugs, as far as I can remember.

>> We don't have the resources to improve either the number of open bugs,
>> or the age of the oldest bug, by enough that anybody would care.
>> By contrast...
>>
>> REGRESSIONS.
>
>
> I agree regressions are important. But we shouldn't frame things as "either
> we look at older bugs or fix regressions". I think each release should pay
> attention to both.

I do not agree. We CANNOT do everything. Anything we do diverts
attention from something else.
I don't see any reason for old bugs to be a high priority. Sure it's
nice, but so are a lot of other things.

It would be true if we'd reached a state where all the open bugs are
of roughly equal importance, (and roughly equal difficulty), but we're
still not there yet.

More importantly, I think this attention is misplaced.
Organizationally, the attention needs to be on Phobos, which, in stark
contrast to DMD, has not noticeably benefited from the move to git.
Look at the changelogs. There are zillions of compiler fixes, and
practically nothing for Phobos.
Phobos is not moving. What can we do to improve the situation?