More bugs, and bug reports, are good. No really, at least that's what Karl Fogel says in trying to squash the idea that bugs are "technical debt that developers must repay. Fogel, who works for Canonical on the Launchpad platform, says that it's a fallacy that growths in bug reports is bad. On the contrary, more bug reports mean good news because it means more users are using the project.

I read glyphobet's blog, itemizing frustrations he's had reporting bugs to Ubuntu. While I've not had frustrating experiences reporting bugs to Ubuntu, I've reported bugs to a lot of different open source projects, and had more than a few closed in a way I wasn't happy with, so I can definitely sympathize. I hope in Ubuntu these sorts of experiences are the exception, but certainly there's always room to improve.

In my own experience at having bugs closed in ways I thought were inappropriate or incorrect, while I was initially angry about it, after reflecting I realized in each case it was really a consequence that I didn't understand that particular project's bug philosophy and had filed the bug in a way that didn't adhere to their guidelines.

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week’s HugDay target is Firefox 3!

* 658 New bugs need a hug
* 131 Confirmed bugs just need a review

Nothing needs to be said about how important Firefox is, it just needs to work. With over 1300 bugs currently open, we can use a lot of help getting the information needed to shake out the bugs.

Finding bugs in your code can be quite nasty—especially if you don’t know where to look. However, finding bugs automatically does not require astronaut training. I think it’s time to leave that “pleasure” to free (as in freedom) automatic static code review tools like the ones reviewed in this series of articles.

"We're currently doing all the planning work for the 0.8 release. Part of the planning work is determining which bugs need to be fixed for the release and which bugfixes can wait. We call this triaging. [...] We're counting on you!"

The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code.

The object of this post is to make you think about ways we could improve each one. I’ll try to link to bugs where there are bugs, but a lot of these are quite new design decisions only present in 10.04 and hence don’t have bugs filed.

kde respects bugs. bugs in kde3 have their equivalent in kde4. rule of thumb in developing kde is 'we do not fix bugs. ever.' the worst part is that important bugs in kde3 were not fixed in several years.

The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.11. This release has been delayed by quite some time due to various blocker bugs which manifested each time we tried to release. A lot of time has gone into hunting down these bugs and various steps have been taken to try to ensure we don't hit this problem again.