[Interest] Priority of bugs

[Alex Blasche]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Interest <interest-bounces+alexander.blasche=qt.io at qt-project.org> On
> Behalf Of Krzysztof Kawa
...
> Anyway, I really don't want to stretch this rant. I'm just bummed about the
> degrading quality of my favorite framework and I hoped I'm not the only one
> that noticed. But maybe I am.

I won't justify why a particular bug has or has not been fixed. That's futile and leads nowhere. Fact is that 
Qt is huge and there are not enough work hours in a day to fix them all. Add natural fluctuation of maintainerships (and its implied competency loss), the fact that some bugs are simply too hard to fix (as they require complete rewrite of subsystems or even Qt6) and last but not least there are things which are too risky to fix because they have an extremely high potential to break other things - well, you can get an idea how hard the problem is. Darwinism works for bugs too....

As I said, I don't want to excuse just merely point out that it is not always as clear cut as you might think. We know our painful limits and we are extremely happy for every help we can get from the community. Some domains are only maintained by the community and I am sure you can understand that nobody can or should ask them to work beyond their dedication either. 

There are a few things where bug reporters can help too. Providing information when asked is extremely helpful. This might mean that reporter has to strip down their buggy app to a point that we can run it by ourselves or they even attempt to identify the problem in the code. That's why we have this additional state "Need more Info" in Jira. Sadly, there are over 2k bugs in the system where we asked for more feedback and have not received the required info within the last 6 months. This situation is so bad that we'll soon close those tasks as incomplete. Of course, the reporter can always reopen and provide more info in case the reporter or the assignee forgot about it. But in the greater context this is an expression of us trying to improve by focusing effort. 

In summary, I absolutely understand your frustration and it pains me too. Looking from an individual reporters perspective, there are bound to be lucky and unlucky ones. As we focus on bugs in the greater scheme of all of Qt I would hope that the lucky ones have a majority. I hope I could shed some light on it from the other side of the fence and create some understanding of the enormity of the task you are asking for.

--
Alex

P.S. On the positive side, in regular intervals we do a bugfixing week. During such a week the entire RnD org focuses only on bugs. I consider them a fairly successful exercise and as luck will have it, we have one next week 😉