More bug fixing needed

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

The number of open glibc bugs has been increasing over the past few 
months.  There are various possible reasons for this:

* People not closing bugs when they fix them.  Patches have recently been 
checked in for bugs 14476 and 14516, for example, but those bugs are still 
open.  If you've checked in patches for any bugs lately, and the patches 
completely fix the bugs (rather than only some cases), please make sure 
that you've marked those bugs as RESOLVED/FIXED, with reference to the 
relevant commit.  The responsibilities of a patch committer include both 
adding fixed bug numbers to NEWS and closing the bugs themselves.

* People being more willing now to file any bugs found, or cleanups where 
it's agreed that a change is desired and there is a clear well-defined 
completion criterion, in Bugzilla (rather than just in private todo list, 
or complaining about the bugs elsewhere without actually reporting them).  
This is good, but with more active bug reporters we need more active bug 
fixing.

* Many of the easier old bugs having been fixed in 2.16, so bugs that are 
left tend to be harder to fix.

* Development generally being less active at this time of year.

However, ultimately we simply need more people fixing more bugs to get the 
number down.  My guess is that probably no more than 100 of the 498 open 
bugs are actually hard in the sense of involving difficult design issues, 
difficult questions as to whether the requested change is actually 
desirable or more than a few hours' work to fix the bug.  Bug fixing is a 
good way to learn more about and get involved in different areas of glibc.  
If everyone of the listed people with commit access were to fix 14 of the 
existing open bugs, they'd all be resolved (although quite a few of those 
people are inactive, I think some more people have had commit access added 
over the past few months without necessarily updating the MAINTAINERS wiki 
page, and you don't need commit access to fix bugs).  If everyone with 
commit access were to fix just 3 of the existing open bugs, there would be 
fewer than 400 left, which would be clear progress.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com