Number of 3.3 hi-pri PRs going up

[Steven Bosscher]

Op vr 21-02-2003, om 18:55 schreef 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.

Right, s/bugs/PRs/g

I mean that a number of bugs, that have been ignored since they were
submitted, are being re-discovered by people who took the time to look
at all the bugs in the database.

> 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 disagree.  There *is* something special about a day on which you see
the number of high priority bugs go up.  It means that there are
literaly dozens of bug reports that have simply been ignored since they
were reported.
(Right now, if a bug comes in, it's analyzed almost immediately.  Sadly,
it wasn't always like that...)

You're right that this doesn't make the compiler less reliable all of a
sudden, because in part those "new" high-priority PRs have been there
for months, and they only are high priority now because somebody
analysed them.

But, the point is not the reliability of the compiler from one day to
the next, but from one *release* to the next. Now look at the number of
regressions from 3.2 on the 3.3 branch...

The fact that one bug fix may cause new bugs is even more worrying
because when so many bug fixes go in just before a release, you may end
up with a compiler that used to work in all the pre-releases and is
suddenly broken in the actual release.  Has that ever happened with GCC?

> 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).

The only reason why these bugs are known now is because some people took
a lot of time to analyse a four digit number of bugs.  Again, many bugs
already were in GNATS, but they were never picked up.

I wouldn't consider 3.3 "better" than a previous release because we now
know about all the regressions from <your favorite GCC version here>.

Anyway, don't get me wrong: I know we'll never see all bugs being
closed, and we'll always have new regressions.  I just think this whole
situation is unfortunate because GCC is already getting a lot of
criticism about its relative slowness, and if the project would release
3.3 with so many known regressions, it probably just means more bad
publicity and fewer reasons for people to start using it.

Greetz
Steven