Re: state of 3.2.1-pre: how far from release?

[Wolfgang Bangerth <bangerth at ticam dot utexas dot edu>]

> We currently have 16 high-priority PRs against the 3.2 branch
> [...]
> There is no hope that the 3.2.1 release will be regression-free in the
> way that we are currently defining regressions: that *some* preceding

Volker Reichelt, I and several others have been sifting through a lot of
old reports recently, and are probably responsible for the many open "high
priority" C++ bugs. I think if we would go on doing so, we could go on
forever changing more reports into "high" mode than can be fixed. I think
hadn't we changed the priority of these reports, the question would not
even have arisen. So if you ask me, i.e. a simple user of gcc, then go
ahead and release the thing.

However, there is a thing that is really worrying me: there are presently
more than 1,800 non-closed reports, of which 570 are for C++ alone. I have
been looking at a lot of them, but the sheer number is creating problems:
I often think that this is a duplicate of something, but cannot seem to
find the other one, etc. That there are so many reports that nobody has
ever looked at is also the reason why we could turn up so many regressions
in so short a time.

If these numbers are allowed to grow, this will be getting out of hand. I 
think it would really be necessary for more people with "fixing capbility" 
to dig through the database and look what can be done. Just letting this 
grow and hoping that some volunteer eventually kills several dozens once 
in a while will not get us anywhere.

(By this I don't imply that gcc is in an overall bad shape. I think the
contrary is true. This is just a management problem, and it needs to be
addressed, because the database will become useless otherwise if there are
too many open reports. In this context, I can also only stress again that
it would be nice to have Bugzilla instead of GNATS, to make searching and
filtering simpler. Another feature that I am greatly missing is a button
to click, reading "I did confirm this report with recent CVS". This way I
could see whether someone looked at this recently or whether it might be
worthwhile re-checking some old report.)

Regards
  Wolfgang

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth              email:           bangerth@ticam.utexas.edu
                               www: http://www.ticam.utexas.edu/~bangerth