Re: [gentoo-user] Number of open Bugzilla bugs (Was: Question about gentoo-sources kernel release versions)

[Michael Jones]

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 8:07 PM Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:

> You could have jumped through all the required hoops and still had it
> ignored.
>

That's pretty horrible, honestly. Why isn't Gentoo doing better than that?

Yes, yes, Gentoo is run by volunteers, so on and so forth. But it's
entirely possible (and regularly accomplished in other organizations) to
emphasise a culture that actively tries to not ignore low hanging fruit for
so long.


> > I'm not attempting to be contradictory for the sake of being
> > contradictory, but the situation is significantly more complicated
> > than what you said
>
> Not sure how that could be.  I literally said "If you do report an
> issue it might or might not get fixed."  I'm pretty sure that hits all
> the examples you supplied, being that it was basically a tautology.
> There simply are no guarantees.
>

There's what you write, and what other people try to guess as to your
meaning. Apparently you intended to mean the tautology, where I instead
thought you meant something more interesting than that.

Honestly, this conversation is just making me less interested in
contributing to Gentoo in the future. Not only do 1-liner pull requests
that fix broken packages get rejected / not fixed for a year, but now I'm
being replied to with word-games when I try to discuss the issues that I
face as an end-user.

> Add to that, Gentoo has *so many bugs* that your bug tracking
> > software, when told to simply "Give me all of the bugs" refuses to
> > actually do so.
>
> It generally isn't a problem unless you run queries with no filters at
> all.  Sure, if you literally ask it for "all of the bugs" you won't
> get them.  So don't ask it for all of them.  I'll note that even if we
> closed all the bugs you'd still get the same error unless you only
> asked for OPEN bugs.  :)
>
> And if what you want is all old bugs closed, you can just filter by
> date, and then you'll get all the benefits of those bugs being
> filtered as far as query response limits are concerned.
>

My issue is that the list of open bugs is one of many proxy-indicators for
other aspects of the Gentoo development process. While fixing the list of
open bugs is not directly a fix for any of the potential underlying reasons
for the various fuzzy and not clearly identified problems, it will very
slightly reduce the overall "badness" while being trivial to implement. I
imagine bugzilla already has some kind of plugin that would accomplish this
that just needs to be enabled.


> > Why should I continue opening new bugs, (or even better, provide
> > patches) when I have new problems?
>
> Simple.  If you provide a patch or bug you're more likely to get a
> response than if you don't.  There are no guarantees either way.
>

That's not supported by my experiences. Anecdotes aren't data, but so far
the bug's reports and patches that I've provided get ignored, but the
issues that I just wait to get fixed for me get fixed.

So it seems to me like I should only file bugs for things that I want to
inflict longer wait times on the rest of the community, and I shouldn't
file bugs for things I actually want fixed.

If you know of anyone who's attempted to do some statistical modeling of
the bug fix rate in Gentoo, I would appreciate being connected to their
research so I can stop feeling like a fool for attempting to help.

> I don't see the problem as Gentoo not knowing that there are issues
> > that should be tracked. I see it as a problem of Gentoo can't engage
> > with it's user community in an effective way. And I see having over
> > 10,000 open bugs as one of the barriers between effective user
> > engagement and what we have today.
>
> I don't see how open bug counts are really the problem here.
>

The amount of open bugs, directly, is not the problem.

The problem is that you're lying to people if you keep a bug in bugzilla
open for 10+ years.

You know it won't be worked on, they know it won't be worked on. So just
close the bug.

> Is there ever a time cutoff, after which a bug should automatically be
> closed, in your opinion?
>
> No.
>

Then I'm not going to continue this discussion with you. Your perspective
on this is utterly incompatible with mine.


> > Surely if something hasn't been addressed in 20 years, it won't be?
>
> If nobody can bother to fix 20 year old bugs on some piece of
> software, why would you be running it today, and thus why would you be
> searching for bugs for it?
>

Then why is it still in the Gentoo package repository?

If it's not in the Gentoo package repository, why is there an open bug in
bugzilla about it?


> Chances are if anybody is maintaining the package then it will
> eventually get noticed and fixed.  If nobody is maintaining it then
> the open bugs aren't really impeding anybody doing fixes.
>

Again, this is contrary to my experiences, and what the Gentoo bug tracker
has in it.


> > 2. The maintainer of the package in question failed to address
> > the problem, even to acknowledge the problems existence, in the
> > preceding 5 years. Maybe it fell through the cracks? Maybe it's being
> > deliberately ignored? Computers can do things for us automatically,
> > like remind people about things.
>
> The only person getting reminded is the requester.  A maintainer that
> is deliberately ignoring bugs will be sending bot mail to /dev/null.
> If requesters start pinging devs in other ways to get their attention
> about such bugs, that seems more likely to just have these devs become
> more aggressive about blocking such attempts from users to
> communicate.  That's probably part of why so few devs are on this list
> at all.  :)
>

Why is that person allowed to be a maintainer for that package then? Sounds
like a pretty complete abandonment of responsibility.

And again, if the only person being reminder is the requestor, then it's
still a high possibility that they will check to see if the bug was fixed
and they didn't realize it, discover that it has been fixed, and then close
the bug.

I just did this process last week with another project I'm involved in and
had 5 bugs get closed as resolved with end-users reporting they simply
didn't realize the bug hadn't been closed before.


> > So stop making it a waste of people's time?
>
> Nobody knows how to do that.  It takes effort to fix bugs, and nobody
> can make an AI that will tell you up-front whether a bug is likely to
> get fixed or not before you bother to file it.
>

There's a "WONTFIX" resolution in bugzilla. If the maintainer isn't going
to fix it, and they mark the issue as WONTFIX, then I won't waste my time
waiting. I'll either find another way to do what I'm trying to do, or
i'll fix the problem myself, or simply do without.

I completely get that the world would be a better place if more bugs
> get fixed.  Honestly, though, the only concrete suggestion you've
> offered is to close old bugs.  I'm skeptical that this would really do
> much to improve quality, and the only place you'd notice the change is
> in running super-broad queries like "give me all the open bugs" that
> nobody doing real work would actually look at.  Maybe superficially it
> makes things look better if you don't know what is actually going on.
> For those submitting bugs though they're just getting all these bug
> closed messages without the bugs being closed.
>

I get 5-10 year old results almost every time I search for any bug related
to problems I'm experiencing. Seeing results from 10 years ago that are
still open means I don't report the issue again. But I don't actually know
that the maintainer of the package even realizes the old bug is there.

Now you're going to tell me if the old bug was closed automatically, and I
opened a new one, that the maintainer of the package is just as likely to
do anything about the new bug as the old bug.

And I'm going to pre-emptively respond by saying "Then close it as WONTFIX"
so I know not to waste my time, or the "maintainers" time, reporting it.

I'm not suggesting rules or actions related to policing the behavior of
Gentoo Developers, because I've seen first hand in the mailing list that
the Gentoo Developers will not be amused, to put it mildly, at that kind of
suggestion.

So my only recourse, as an end user, is to explain to you the problems I
see, and try to offer "concrete" suggestions that involve purely
technological solutions.

Closing bug reports after 10 years isn't perfect. Honestly I'd rather see
Gentoo encourage a developer community that doesn't ignore things for a
decade. But that's not going to happen, and I'm not suggesting it.

So instead I suggest something that can be implemented, without changing
anyone's behavior, and without requiring substantial work from the person
implementing the suggestion.

It's not a perfect solution, but perfect is the enemy of good, after all.


> If I'm maintaining the package foo then I'm going to ask for all the
> open foo bugs, and having a few 10 year old bugs in the list is no big
> deal.  If the package is actively maintained chances are that somebody
> will get around to closing them if they look invalid.  If the package
> isn't actively maintained then nobody will even look at the list
> except maybe a user, and the fact that 10 year old bugs are sitting
> around might be a useful clue that it isn't maintained.
>

Why is Gentoo shipping packages that aren't maintained? Isn't that what the
"last rights" emails I get from time to time are all about?

On a side note it looks like my oldest open bug is 12 years old.  I'm
> actually not quite sure if it is valid - maybe I'll post a comment and
> see...  :)
>
> --
> Rich
>
>
As stated in the middle of this reply, your perspective on this is
completely incompatible with mine, so I won't continue this conversation.

Nevertheless, thank you for discussing it with me