Re: Bug statistics

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > However, duplicates would not be a problem if we
 > had a small number of open bug reports.  We would see
 > them and close them when we close the others that they match.

No, people frequently report duplicates of closed bugs too, and this
is more likely if the normal search doesn't report closed bugs.
Fixing bugs quickly doesn't prevent duplicates, and perhaps more
important, a regression will appear to the bug tracker as a duplicate.
You really want automatic dupe-finding capability in your bug tracker.

 > I think the problem is not enough effort to fix bugs.

Easily said, but you can't provide that effort yourself, nor can
Stefan et al, not for more than a short spurt.

What you could do is revisit decisions to impose inappropriate
infrastructure on the project, inappropriate in the sense that it's
clearly inconveniencing the "long tail" of users who are devoting
small amounts of time (from 0 to a few tens of minutes a week) to
Emacs, and therefore could easily double the amount of effort they
grant Emacs.

This is especially important for bug triage, which is boring,
unpleasant work with few intrinsic rewards at best.