bugs and fixes in LibreOffices issue tracker -- beyond the 3.6 series

Posted by Bjoern Michaelsen on 24 July 2013

bugs and fixes in LibreOffices issue tracker -- beyond the 3.6 series

Hey ho, let's go Hey ho, let's go They're forming in a straight line They're going through a tight wind

-- Blitzkrieg Bop, Ramones

Italo wrote this nice overview on the history of LibreOffice giving a somewhat nostalgic view back on the early days and some good statistics on what we achieved since then, so when I posted the postmortem on LibreOffice 3.6 yesterday there were some questions on the numbers beyond the LibreOffice 3.6 series. Well, without further ado here they are:(*)

minorfixesall

There is some healthy growth in fixes going in each release although it somewhat slowed down(**) around the 3.6 series as the amount of bugfixes grew in a way that made it quite some extra work to keep up with their administration purely on a mailing list. Luckily, this is were gerrit came into play: In the 4.0 series most commits (77%) are reviewed on gerrit, which steamlined the work in a way that made the rate of fixes climbing again(***), so that the current LibreOffice 4.0.4 has more bugfixes in a minor release than any previous version that early in the cycle.

Note though that these bug fix counts can not be simply added for a multitude of reasons:

  • some bugfixes go into multiple releases (because there is more than one active branch at any given time)
  • some bugfixes do not get accounted for in the bug tracker
  • many (in fact most of the exciting and interesting ones) go into the major series updates and not into a minor bugfix update
So how many bugs did LibreOffice resolve since it started? Its hard to tell, because these issues are not always tracked in one issue tracker(****). However, this table from bugzilla gives a lower bound. As of 2013-07-23, the LibreOffice project resolved 12.596 bug reports on its own issue tracker, half of those fixed by developers, half of those hunted down and triaged by the QA team:
  • 4.389 bug reports were intentionally fixed by developers (resolution: FIXED)
  • 2.123 bug reports were unintentionally fixed by developers and then found fixed by the QA team (resolution: WORKSFORME -- sometimes one bug causes multiple symptoms, so a fix for one bug report might also solve another that the developer is not aware of)
  • 3.003 bug reports were identified as a duplicate of an existing report by the QA team (resolution: DUPLICATE)
  • 3.081 bug reports were found to be invalid of some kind (resolution: INVALID, NOTABUG, NOTOURBUG, ...)
So in summary: Since it started and as of 2013-07-23, the LibreOffice project in total at least fixed 6.512 issues and resolved 12.596 bug reports from its own issue tracker.

() A note on the minor release bug fix counts: They are just scraped off from the ChangeLog pages like https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.4/RC1 -- esp. for older releases these might still be a bit off. () note that the 3.6 series was alive 3 month longer than 3.5 (~35% more time), without receiving the same amount of additional fixes. () To the tune of the Ramones quoted above. (****) For example, at the time of writing, there are 256 resolved issues in launchpad tracking bugs at LibreOffice of 1969 resolved issues filed against LibreOffice on Ubuntu in total as only a subset of well-triaged and hard to fix issues is upstreamed. So the numbers given above are not conflicting at all with e.g. the estimate of 3.000 bug fixes in LibreOffice 4.1 alone. See the development FAQ for an overview of common issue trackers referenced in commit messages.

Originally published on 2013-07-24 06:36:07 on wordpress.

Categories: #libreoffice #ubuntu