[dmd-internals] Oldest five bugs

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/18/12 5:34 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> If people don't "experience" bugs they will not even look at the age of
> bugs, they will not even look at the bug tracker! How many times did you
> checked the bug from other languages?

I actually do, and also there's plenty of press that can be seen about 
it. "The flash focus bug in firefox has been opened for five years!" I 
saw similar issues with gcc, php, and others.

> I use GCC and Python on a daily
> basis for years now, and I think I might had a look in their bug
> trackers about 2 or 3 times in that time frame. With D I look at it this
> many times per month maybe. That's not because I like to see how old
> bugs are, but because I get bit by bugs. That are the bugs that should
> be fixed first.

Consider what's now the oldest opened bug: 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=143. Are there more 
frequently encountered bugs? Sure. Are you likely to hit this in a small 
personal project? Probably not. But if someone sees it they may think, 
"so these punks designed and advertised a feature in the language and 
didn't implement it in five years? Good riddance!"

Again, our process of fixing bugs is stochastic enough to not make old 
bugs any less important than any others. So all other things being 
equal, old bugs are more important because they mean bad PR.

> And again, the age of a bug is only relevant when users actually *hit*
> the bug. I agree that if two bugs are equally annoying and important,
> the oldest one should be fixed first, that would show the users they
> won't have to fight the bugs they *hit* for too long. But it makes no
> sense to spend time fixing a bug that nobody cares just because if
> 6 years old when there is a but that's more important and it's just
> 4 months old. It also doesn't make sense to close the bug because it's
> old, it should be fixed eventually when there is nothing more
> important to fix (or when somebody finds fixing that bug particularly
> fun, don forget that most of the people do this as a hobby). It doesn't
> make any sense to conceal it's age either.

This reasoning assumes some sort of statistical effects are at work. 
Unfortunately that is not the case yet.


Andrei