Re: Bug statistics

[Karl Fogel]

Glenn Morris <address@hidden> writes:
>Karl Fogel wrote:
>> That page turns out to be just a random 100 out of many bug reports --
>
>It is the 100 most recent reports, most recent first.
>This is not "random".

Since the page doesn't say that, they are random to the user.  (I
actually guessed it, but wasn't sure and didn't see a way to be sure.
There isn't any date information on the page.)

>The machine serving the reports is not powerful enough to show more
>than about 400 at once.

Understood.  I wasn't saying we shouldn't paginate results.

>> I don't know if my periodic rants about our bug tracker have any
>> constructive effect.  
>
>Not really. They just put my back up, and it's basically just me
>trying to deal with these issues. I'm sure you know more constructive
>ways to report problems, that are more likely to get results.

Sorry, I didn't know it put your back up.  I'll keep that in mind in the
future.  I tried to be specific in my critique -- ranty tone aside, I
pointed out several things that would be easy improvements for someone
familiar with our bug tracker deployment.  (I am not familiar with it,
and unfortunately can't become so due to other committments.)

>Sorry debbugs is not Launchpad, I guess.

I'm not advocating Launchpad.  I think I've proposed it as *a* solution
in the past, but certainly not as the only possible solution.

>> An analysis of the number of unique submitters would tell us far more.
>
>I quoted that number in my first email. 1218. Attached is a histogram.

Thank you (and for the histogram).  I was only looking at Richard's
quoted excerpt.  That part of your original email is exactly what I had
in mind.

If the spread of submitter uniqueness goes down even as the rate of
submissions stays the same or increases, then we'll know we have a
problem.  It would mean fewer people are submitting bug reports, which
would imply either that users are losing motivation to submit bugs
(bad), or that the actual number of users is going down (worse).

-Karl