Too Many Bugs

[Gervase Markham]

MattyT wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 02:40, Gervase Markham wrote:
>>What we actually need is strong ownership of components - so the module 
>>owner will decide "no, we're definitely not going to do this", and close 
>>the bug as WONTFIX, or decide "yes, we would like to do this", and say 
>>so on the bug - at which point anyone who wishes can start coding.
> 
> Again, WONTFIX should not be relevant to bugs, there is no such thing as
> a bug that should be WONTFIX.

Yes there is :-) You may decide that fixing it would be too disruptive 
for too little gain, and so you're going to live with it indefinitely. I 
can think of at least two examples of this recently. One is the renaming 
of database fields.

> Strong ownership would perhaps be useful in another way however, in that
> people currently feel no responsibility to fix bugs.  

That's somewhat of a generalisation. I invite you to look through the 
Reporting and Charting component as a counter-example. :-)

>>I suggest, though, that before everyone goes off in a triaging frenzy, 
>>we wait until the upcoming releases are out the door, b.m.o. is 
>>upgraded, the regressions are crushed, b.m.o. does its CVS update, and 
>>is back on an even keel again. I expect that to take a couple of weeks.
> 
> I don't really see how this matters.  

It matters because people can only be doing one thing at once, and you 
can't focus your resources across the board. IMO it's important to be 
focussed on getting a high-quality upgraded b.m.o. up and running ASAP. 
Triaging old bugs helps this goal only in a very indirect way.

Gerv