[GNC-dev] What about outdated open bugs in Gnucash Bugzilla?

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 26, 2019, at 2:34 PM, Christian Gruber <christian.gruber at posteo.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi, I'm currently looking through the (quite long) buglist on Gnucash Bugzilla <https://bugs.gnucash.org/> to see, where I can provide help. Unfortunatelly I'm a little bit frustrated, because of many entries, which are still open (STATUS != RESOLVED), but haven't changed for years.
> 
> Which of them are still relevant? When is a bug outdated? Are some of them maybe already resolved, but haven't been closed? Who actually closes a bug, the author or the Gnucash maintainers? Are there any plans to close outdated bugs?
> 
> I had a look on Bugzilla Administration <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla_Administration> page, but this didn't answer my questions.


Christian,

The overall problem is too many bugs, not enough developer time to go through them, especially old ones. Yes, it's entirely possible that many of them have been subsequently fixed by someone working on something else and that someone didn't think to go looking for related bugs. Unfortunately it's equally likely that some of those old bugs are too hard to fix or even to find the cause, or that no developer ever even got interested in looking into them.

Which ones are still relevant is hard to determine: GnuCash is complex and there have been lots of bugs over the years that were revealed because of a corner case in someone's accounts, so just because a developer or tester can't reproduce a bug doesn't mean that it's invalid. I suppose one could declare a bug obsolete if the module that would have caused it is easily identifiable and that code has been substantially rewritten since, but determining that isn't necessarily easy. The only policy we have is that if a bug is marked "NEEDSINFO" and none has been provided after 3 Months it can be resolved as INCOMPLETE, usually with a note telling the reporter to reopen it if they ever get around to caring about it again.

It's nice but rare when the reporter closes a bug, so it usually falls to a developer.

Note that of the 1364 open GnuCash bugs, 489 are enhancement requests.

Non-enhancement bugs 2001-01-01 to 2010-12-31:  155
                     2011-01-01 to 2015-12-31:  296
                     2016-01-01 to 2016-12-31:   48
                     2017-01-01 to 2017-12-31:   77
                     2018-01-01 to 2018-12-31:  117
                     2019-01-01 to Now:         210

As an illustration of how old bugs can still be relevant, https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88517 is the oldest open bug (from July 2002). It's about copying and pasting transactions, was last commented on in 2017, and I think
is still valid.

Regards,
John Ralls