Hello, This is a complaint about how the bug database is being managed. It is getting harder and harder to find bug reports to work on, because too many old bug reports are being kept open even though there is no sign of intent to ever resolve the report.
For example, PR18346 is a bug report in Bugzilla, and it is apparently a regression. It's not a high-priority regression, because it is for a target that is neither a secondary nor a primary platform. But the bug report of course does show up in the overview of regressions (such as the "All regressions" link on the homepage). Some facts about this bug report: * the bug was reported by the only listed maintainer for this target * the bug was confirmed by the reporter himself * the bug has seen *no* activity at all in 3.5 years. * the target maintainer insists that the bug report should be kept open Literally no action has been taken for three and a half years! Not by the target maintainer and not by anyone else. This is an extreme case, but it is not entirely unusual that regression PRs (even some P3 and P2 ones) have not seen any activity for two years or more. The bigger issue here, is that people seem to be using Bugzilla as a kind-of TODO list for things may some day work on, but probably will not. The result is that Bugzilla becomes increasingly hard to use over time: The number of open reports in Bugzilla keeps increasing, the list of so-called low-priority regression becomes less useful with each release, and identifying regressions that people actually care about becomes practically impossible. (See also my earlier complaint about a similar ages old bug report that isn't going anywhere: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2007-11/msg00659.html). The current list of "All regressions" should be a list of bugs that people are actively trying to resolve, preferably before the release of GCC 4.3. Instead, it is a mix of high-activity bug reports and bug reports where even the target maintainer has been unwilling for 3.5 years to spend some time on resolving the bug report. So to pick a bug report to work on, I need to go through the but report summaries of a long list, trying to pick out new regressions between the old no-one-cares P4 and P5 regressions. Maybe it is just me, but I find it very annoying to have to wade through long bug lists, so I just don't do this. Instead I just don't look at P4/P5 regressions anymore at all. It's just too much trouble to find a bug report where the reporter or the target maintainer cares as much as you do about resolving the bug. The victims, in the end, are GCC's users. Once a regression report from a user had been downgraded to P4 or P5, it disappears from the radar into the grey mess of older reports. Is this really how this community wants to manage its bug database? To me, the situation is quite clear: If a bug report is open for so long, and even the reporter and the responsible maintainer show no sign of motivation to work on resolving the bug, I think this tells us something about how important this bug is: Not important enough to fix. IMOH we should close such reports as WONTFIX or SUSPENDED to make them less visible, so that other bug reports don't fall through the cracks. So I'm asking for a policy here that says when it is OK to resolve old bug without progress as WONTFIX or SUSPENDED. Start shooting. Gr. Steven
