Bug maintenance

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

On 08/05/16 23:13, Oleg Endo wrote:
>>> There are nearly 10,000 still unresolved bugs in Bugzilla, almost
>>> half of which are New, and a third Unconfirmed, so I'm sure any
>>> effort to help reduce the number is of value and appreciated.
>>
>> That's exactly what prompted me to ask.  There's such a vast number
>> of them, it's hard to believe that 9 year old bugs are still of
>> interest.
>
> Sometimes there is.  Before randomly closing any bugs because they are
> too old, one should@least have a look@them and see if they're
> still an issue etc.  Often things would've been fixed along the way,
> but not all of them.

There are some 10-years old bugs that have a very clear description of what 
needs to be done to fix them, it is just that no one has had time to do it yet. 
Others don't have a clear fix, but there is a lot of info about things tried 
but failed. Losing all that info would be bad.

My humble opinion is that going through the list from old to new is not the 
most useful or efficient way to contribute to GCC (if it is the only way you 
want to contribute, then please go ahead, it is still useful). Old bugs do not 
hurt anyone except perhaps when searching for duplicates. In that case, it may 
be worth spending a few minutes checking if it is fixed already, ask the 
submitter for more info, or confirm it if UNCONFIRMED and updating the 
description so one can see clearly that it is not a duplicate.

Triaging old bugs (except for fixing them) is not the most useful: users may 
have simply forgotten all about it or not be able to reproduce it anymore or 
moved on and not care...

On the other hand, it is rather more useful to start with recent bugs, which 
are more likely to be relevant, and confirm them, ask for more info, find 
oldest duplicate with more info, or classify them under various meta-bugs.

Rather than seeing Bugzilla as a TODO list for devs, it is rather more precise 
to see it as a knowledge database about bugs.

Cheers,
	Manuel.