Number of 3.3 hi-pri PRs going up

[Robert Dewar]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 01:20:03PM +0100, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> 
> Just one week before the planned release of GCC 3.3, the number of
> high-priority bugs for 3.3 is going *up* instead of down!
> 
> Mostly thanks to Wolfgang and Janis, for quite a few PRs the patches
> causing the bugs have been located.  Unfortunately, hardly any of these
> PRs were picked up by by somebody for fixing.

Actually you don't mean that the number of bugs is going up, you mean that
the number of *known* bugs is going up.

There is nothing special about a day on which you know of no high priority bugs,
it does not mean that something is more reliable on that day than on the day before
when you fixed one bug (but perhaps introduced another that you don't know about)
or the next day when you discovered two more bugs that had been there for ever.

I always find that at the time of a release, people get into a mode of being
upset if there are high priority known bugs, and of course it is great to squash
all the bugs you can, but realistically the system has a large number of bugs that
you don't know about, and for a user it matters little whether a bug is known
or not known (actually it is somewhat better if it is known, because then perhaps
it can be avoided).