Dear Internals
I have in the past few days been working on, and I continue to work on
cleaning up our bug tracker. We are close to 5000 open bugs[1], while
about 1500 of those are FR requests, some opened as far back as
2001[2].
I would urge more to help bring down that number, even if you just got
5 minutes to take a look at a random open bug[3] and classify it, it
would be a lot of help. A lot of the old ones are report still from a
PHP4 era, which may no longer be relevant or even fixed/implemented in
a newer version.
Another notable thing is that a lot of bugs are assigned but are often
forgotten, I would argue that it does two negative things which we
should be attempting to avoid:
- Creating a false feeling that a report is actively been worked on
and the reporter expects this to be fixed in a reasonable future.
- It may steer away new contributors who wants to fix a bug but the
ones they are interested in are already "falsely" assigned as to the
point above.
I would like for those who have assigned bugs to them[4] to review
their assigned bugs and unassign them if you don't intend on working
on them in a not too distant future to open them up for others to
grab.
Currently I'm going over every single report to try classify them,
close reports which would require an RFC, PECL packages with no
releases for literally years and unassign people from bug reports
which have not been active (committed) in a long time, or similar. I
don't want to step on anyones toes but I think it is time that there
is done something about this, if you are unhappy with a change I have
done to a report where you were assigned, then please reach out as
I'm doing this in the best intend for PHP.
[1] https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&order_by=assign&direction=DESC&limit=80000&status=Open&reorder_by=id
[2] https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=12802
[3] https://bugs.php.net/random
[4] https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&assign=USERNAME
--
regards,
Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net
