Tue, 28 Oct 2008

release critical bug stats

The unofficial rc bug thingy currently lists:

• 177 rc Bugs affecting the next stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny:
  • 82 Bugs of them, fixed in the unstable branch Sid
  • 95 Bugs open in both, Lenny and Sid of these:
    • 6 marked as pending
    • 14 have already a patch
    • 11 have been reported multiple times

Ignoring bugs, which are marked pending, have a patch, have been reported multiple times or concern packages in contrib or non-free, that leaves 65 release critical bugs.

Again a big improvement compared to the numbers of last week. Thanks for everyone helping!

However 20 of them have been reported more than 30 days ago; maybe they are quite complicated, so please pay special attention to them.

Last week we had 49 of these old release critical bugs; seems that progress is done here, too :)

postet at 18:24 into [Debian] permanent link

Mon, 20 Oct 2008

release critical bug stats

The unofficial rc bug thingy currently lists:

• 217 rc Bugs affecting the next stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny:
  • 87 Bugs of them, fixed in the unstable branch Sid
  • 130 Bugs open in both, Lenny and Sid of these:
    • 5 marked as pending
    • 18 have already a patch
    • 11 have been reported multiple times

Ignoring bugs, which are marked pending, have a patch, have been reported multiple times or concern packages in contrib or non-free, that leaves 95 release critical bugs.

Sadly that's not that well compared to the numbers from last week. But thanks for everyone helping!

However 49 of them have been reported more than 30 days ago; maybe they are quite complicated, so please pay special attention to them.

postet at 22:43 into [Debian] permanent link

Mon, 13 Oct 2008

release critical bug stats

The unofficial rc bug thingy currently lists:

• 200 rc Bugs affecting the next stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny:
  • 90 Bugs of them, fixed in the unstable branch Sid
  • 110 Bugs open in both, Lenny and Sid of these:
    • 14 marked as pending
    • 28 have already a patch
    • 13 have been reported multiple times

Ignoring bugs, which are marked pending, have a patch, have been reported multiple times or concern packages in contrib or non-free, that leaves 63 release critical bugs.

That's quite impressive compared to the numbers from last week. Thanks for everyone helping!

However 36 of them have been reported more than 30 days ago; maybe they are quite complicated, so please pay special attention to them.

PS: Yes, I know, that the layout of my webpage breaks the nested lists above. Sorry; will fix it soon.

postet at 16:51 into [Debian] permanent link

Tue, 07 Oct 2008

About the number of rc bugs

In addition to my last post, here some information about the current number of release critical bugs.

Yes, it is true, that our official bug tracker lists the next release has still 264 bugs¹. And some wonder, when Lenny will be released.

It's a little bit difficult to work with that page, let's look at the unofficial rc bug thingy I already mentioned in my previous post. As you might have noticed it supports several filters mechanism the official bts don't have. At the very bottom of the detailed list you'll see the overall number of the bugs matching your selected filter. So let's have a look at the number of bugs, which are already fixed in the unstable branch and need to propagate to Lenny. Currently that are 118 RC bugs.

Of those 264 preventing us to release, 118 are already fixed; the fix just hasn't arrived in Lenny, yet.

Okay, but there are still 147 rc Bugs open in both Lenny and Sid. So let's take a look at them. By using the filters at the top, you can calculate, that 19 already have a patch. 14 are marked pending (so they are already fixed, but the maintainer hasn't uploaded the package yet). 15 of these bugs have been reported multiple times and have been merged. Oh, and 3 are about packages in non-free and contrib.

Granted, for some of them, there is a patch, but the patch needs to be tested, or the bug has been marked pending by mistake. But still: If you ignore all these types of bugs, there are only 104 bugs left. one-hundred-and-four!

Summary: So the only thing left (beside the points I mention in my previous post) to do, is to migrate 118 fixes to Lenny somehow, get the 33 fixes for the probably fixed bugs uploaded, and fix the remaining 104 bugs.

Yes, that's still a lot of work to do... So let's get things rolling, shall we?

1: You might further notice, that the current stable release is affected by more than 700 bugs. However many of them are false counts, e.g. when a specific package doesn't build with a newer version of a compiler. The package in the current stable release is of course affected, so there it is kind of buggy. However, we can ignore these kind of bugs, since the newer version of the compiler isn't shipped in the current stable release at all. Those bugs should actually be tagged sid and lenny...

postet at 21:34 into [Debian] permanent link

What you can do for Lenny (Update #3)

You probably noticed by now, that Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 aka Lenny hasn't been released in September. Well, that's a shame, but very easy to explain: Too many release critical bugs.

Well, it's pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC bugs will be fixed, and apparently our release team was a bit too optimistic :(

The big question is: What can you do, to help release Lenny at least in this quarter? That's pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that the fixed packages are migrated to Lenny, do upgrade tests, document problems in the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn't it?

For users

Even as a simple user (aren't we all just users?) you may help getting Lenny released. Some things you can do:

• If you are running stable (aka Etch), you could consider upgrading to Lenny and see, if everything works fine. Currently there are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best way to test upgrades are to:
  1. Make backups
  2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
  3. Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
  4. Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package management
  5. Run script aptitude full-upgrade
  6. Exit the environment of the script command, by typing exit
  If something goes wrong / something unexpected happens, please report it. If you already know a specific package, report a bug against that package. If you don't know, please report a bug describing the problem you experienced to the upgrade-reports package. If your problem is something, which can't be fixed properly, but should be documented (e.g. hardware support regressions, packages no longer available) please report a bug against the release-notes package (Bonus points if you not only report the bug, but also supply a paragraph to be added to the release notes).
  The command script will log the entire output of the command in the file typescript. Should something go wrong during the upgrade, please send this file along with your bug report.
  Update: If you upgraded succesfully, you should report that, too. There's a template for upgrade reports, which you can use.
• Speaking of the release notes: You can take a look at the bugs reported against the release notes and see if you can help there, e.g. by writing a paragraph describing a problem.
• Install the package devscripts (you'll need the version provided by backports.org, and run the script rc-alert --include-dists TU --include-dist-op and. You'll get a list of release critical bugs open for one of the packages you have installed. Guessing that you have them installed, because you are using them and are interested in them, you should have a very high interest to get these bugs fixed :)
  You can try to help, by trying to reproduce them and reporting that to the bug report. There are even some easy bugs, where the maintainer hasn't found the time to fix it, yet. Bug 497290 for example didn't need deep technical skills. It just needed someone with some time to collect the needed data for the copyright file.
• If you speak a language other than English, you might consider joining the translation efforts. While it is to late to translate the debian-installer or the installation guide to a new language for Lenny (perhaps for the next release then?), you could start translating the release notes to a not yet supported language. If you are willing to do so (which can be quite time consuming, especially in the final phase), please contact either your localization team or the debian doc mailing list if there's no local mailing list.

See? Even as a simple user without deeper technical knowledge you can help us getting Lenny in shape to be released. If you have technical knowledge: Very good! You might want to read the next section, too, and see what applies to you, there :)

For maintainers

It basically boils down to two things: If your packages have RC bugs open in Lenny fix them and take care, that the fix will propagate to Lenny. If your packages don't have RC bugs open, fix someone else's RC bug. Surely you don't think, the release team will fix the remaining rc bugs, do you? And surely you understand, that your shiny rc bug free packages are kind of useless, if they aren't released?

To search for bugs to be fixed, take a look at the unofficial rc bugs thingy. The URL lists RC bugs open in both Sid and Lenny. Obviously they should be fixed ASAP. If no one takes care about these packages, they might be removed from Lenny (if possible).

Again: Try to reproduce the bug, try fix it, upload an NMU (or send your patch to the bug report and search for an sponsor). You'll notice, that some of these bugs already have a patch. In that case, your job would be to test the patch, report that to the bug report and offer to sponsor an NMU.

Another interesting list is the list of rc bugs open only in Lenny. These bugs have been fixed, but the fix hasn't propagated to Lenny, yet. Normally, the release team will grant freeze exceptions for these packages if possible. However, if the changes to the fixed version are quite grave or the package in Sid depends on a newer package than in Lenny that's not possible. In these cases look out for packages marked as need tpu upload or similar.

Oh, and if you could refrain from upload new upstream versions of packages to Sid, you would make all our lives easier. Some reasons:

• New packages won't reach Lenny anyway.
• Upload new packages to Sid makes it harder to get a fix into Lenny should a new bug be found.
• Uploading a new package makes it harder for other packages depending on your package to be migrated to Lenny.
• You are wasting the buildd's time.

And of course you should spend your time fixing rc bugs anyway ;)

Update: Rhonda pointed out, that running rc-alert -d TU -o and will limit the output to bugs open in both Sid and Lenny, which is the more interesting list of bugs.

Update: script is shipped in the package bsdutils and not in a sepperate package. Thanks to Sebastian Niehaus for notifying!

postet at 17:12 into [Debian] permanent link