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

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 7:23 PM Michael Jones <gentoo@×××××××.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 5:43 PM Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> Bugs get closed all the time.  Bugs also get opened and and linger all
>> the time.  I couldn't tell you the ratio, but that is the nature of
>> things.
>>
>> If you don't report an issue, and nobody else is aware of it, I can
>> pretty much guarantee that nobody will fix it.  If you do report an
>> issue it might or might not get fixed.  That's the nature of the
>> beast.
>
> Or in my case, I sometimes post 1-line pull requests to the Gentoo
> github, which fix packages being unable to compile, which get rejected
> because I didn't jump through enough hoops, and the bug remains
> unfixed for over a year after I open the PR. I stopped posting PRs
> after that, since it's a waste of my time.

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

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Let's suppose we put in a bot that closes all bugs 5 minutes after
they are opened, unconditionally, and locked them.  We'd have nearly
zero open bugs at all times that way.  Obviously that wouldn't
increase user engagement.

I don't think your frustration is really that bugs that were opened 15
years ago by somebody else are still open.  I think your frustration
is that a bug you open tomorrow is reasonably likely to not be fixed.
CLOSED-EXPIRED or whatever isn't the status you want - you want
RESOLVED-FIXED.  And that is completely normal.  However, the only
thing that is going to lead to this is people actually fixing bugs,
not bots playing with statuses.

Gentoo will NEVER engage with its user community in a way you consider
effective by these sorts of standards.  If Gentoo had 50,000
developers that were all super-active we'd STILL have this problem,
because such a high level of quality would bring in millions of users,
and they'd be filing millions of bugs, and those mere 50,000
developers would still not get everything resolved.  Granted, I won't
say that this will scale up infinitely but I think that even
high-quality or professional distros still end up with more bugs than
they can really fix.

>> Honestly, I'm not sure how having bots beg bug reporters about letting
>> their bugs be closed relentlessly (albeit at a very slow rate) until
>> they finally stop responding is going to improve things.  Somebody
>> reports an issue and is frustrated that nobody does anything about it.
>
> Is there ever a time cutoff, after which a bug should automatically be closed, in your opinion?

No.

> 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?

> Either:
>
> 1. The bug hasn't been acted on in the previous 5 years on bugzilla,
> but maybe it's been fixed and the original reporter / developer
> forgot to do anything in bugzilla about it. Or no one realized it was
> fixed. This kind of thing happens all the time.

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.

> 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 would a maintainer acknowledge the existence of a problem they
don't intend to fix?  That is just going to invite somebody nagging
them about it.  There is no penalty for failing to acknowledge a bug,
but there is more likely to be social pressure/etc if somebody acks
that a bug exists and then just ignores it.  I think this is why so
many tend to have such a passive-aggressive stance towards bugs.
Maybe some of the solution is to avoid criticizing devs who ack that a
bug is really serious but that they don't intend to do anything about
it.  That seems unlikely to happen.

I imagine that a lot of bugs fall into the general category of
something a dev thinks should be fixed, but it won't be easy to fix
and it might or might not even be within the dev's skills to fix.  So
they just sit there.

>> My gut feeling is that this sort of thing will make people even less
>> likely to report new bugs they find, because they're constantly being
>> reminded of ancient situations where this turned out to be a waste of
>> time.  If they weren't reminded of this they'd be more likely to
>> report an issue, and that might or might not be a waste of time.
>
> 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.

> You're reaction to this suggestion gives me the impression that
> Gentoo, as a project, considers it to be just fine for issues to be
> completely untouched for a decade, no acknowledgment, no action.

I don't speak for Gentoo, as a project. I'm not sure that anybody
really does.  To the extent that they do they generally give nicely
stated answers that try to avoid offending anybody.  :)

> Do you think that's fine? Or not? I just want to make sure I fully
> understand your point of view.

I'm not sure what "fine" even means here.  I don't think it is "fine"
that any software has bugs at all in the first place, or that bugs
aren't fixed within milliseconds of being reported, or that people
everywhere die routinely without even living a full century.  I also
think that there is almost nothing that can be practically done right
now to prevent any of these things, so I don't get worked up about it.

I use Gentoo when it is the best tool for the job, which is often,
IMO.  Other distros have strengths and weaknesses, and different
approaches to bug QA.  Many distros would solve this problem by
removing packages from the repo until it is just a core set of
dependencies and system packages that could be maintained more
responsively, and then everything else is somebody else's problem.
Gentoo tends to prefer to keep stuff in the central repos where it
tends to get at least a bit more QA.  There are pros and cons to
either approach.  Some distros might boot devs who ignore bugs, and
would prefer to just have a very small number of very active devs over
something like what Gentoo has, which is a lot of devs who are only
narrowly active.

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.

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.

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