[Development] Error database cleaning continues

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Sep 29, 2026, at 06:52, Jason McDonald <macadder1 at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 28 Sept 2026 at 21:34, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development <development at qt-project.org<mailto:development at qt-project.org>> wrote:
I must say I'm not pleased at all with this process. From the
notifications I'm getting, a ton of widgets-related bugs are being
closed "simply" because they're old. With QtWidgets being "done" both in
Qt 5 and Qt 6, it's extremely likely that many these bugs are still
completely valid. We're just shoving the dust under the carpet, open bug
reports counter goes down, everybody happy?

FWIW, I endorse everything Guiseppe said. I am bemused that so many people in our industry still conflate the age of a bug report with its validity (or lack thereof).

Throughout my 30+ year career, I have had this argument with managers and developers more times than I can remember and, more often than not, my advice has fallen of deaf ears, leaving me to wonder why we always need to learn certain lessons the hard way.

Nah, they really can’t.  The result is you can’t trust the status of the bug.  If it’s not “Fixed” (and perhaps even if it is!), consider it to be open regardless of such silly machinations.  It’s just as in the bug-fixing weeks, some people call them bug-closing weeks, and even some of the fixes cause further regressions: so the problem is nothing new.

I do find that Claude is helping to really fix the tough old bugs, and the ones we kept procrastinating fixing for real (before, it wasn’t worth my time to dig deep unless it was a P1, a customer bug or seemed especially compelling; or I didn’t know enough to work outside my usual areas: well now my time has been multiplied, to the extent that I can stay sane despite all the multitasking).  But it’s getting more expensive as of this week.  I suspect management will again push back about the now-concrete cost of fixing low-priority bugs this way.  And then we will have to use offline LLMs more for such things.

Plus, getting reviews is not getting easier at the rate that writing code is getting easier, although perhaps somewhat.

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