[Sugar-devel] What is a bug?

[James Cameron]

What can I do to help?  Research old bugs.

A bug, or an issue, is an unexpected unplanned software behaviour.

When you see a bug ticket or issue numbered, that means a desire for
change did once exist.  The desire for change may still exist, or it
may not.  It is difficult to tell.  (Along with that desire for change
is an intention to not make the change right now; don't create an
issue just so a pull request can have an issue to link to!)

The first bug tracker related to Sugar was http://dev.laptop.org/
which is an instance of the web application software Trac.  It
contains more than 12k tickets.  Scope is OLPC OS, Fedora packages for
OLPC, Sugar, activities, and OLPC infrastructure.

The second bug tracker was https://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ which is also
an instance of Trac.  It contains about 5k tickets.  Scope is Sugar on
a Stick, Fedora packages for Sugar, Sugar, activities, and Sugar Labs
infrastructure.

Both instances of Trac have a mailing list to which new tickets are
posted.  There is also a "Timeline" view for recent activity.

Subsequent bug tracking has been invited using GitHub issues, with an
issue list for each repository.  This decision has caused two big
problems;

- we can no longer get a sense of what should be fixed without looking
  into each of many repositories,

- it contributed to killing general bug reporting, because at the time
  a bug is reported the person who reported it has no idea what
  component is responsible.

GitHub issues has become more of a developer to developer
communication channel.  This is unfortunate.

There are thousands of issues with Sugar that have not been fixed.
Most of those issues won't ever be fixed, because of one or more of
these reasons (most likely first);

- there is no developer interested in making a change,

- the person who found the issue is no longer wanting a change,

- the symptom was already solved but the bug or issue was left open,

- the software component was rewritten,

- the software component was abandoned or deprecated,

- the person who found the issue made a mistake in observation,

- the person who found the issue had incorrect expectations.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/