In various web log entries (see http://planet.debian.org), Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, Joey Hess, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, Eduard Bloch, Bernhard R. Link, and possibly others, discuss the significance of having lots of bugs open against a package.
This has reminded me that during Debconf6, I meant to propose that we set up some carefully selected statistics to measure the progress of Debian development. The statistics needs to be selected very carefully because there is a possibility that people will optimize their behavior according to the statistics, and we'd want them to optimize in the right way. Here's what I'd like to propose: we publish, once per week or so, the following numbers, on debian-devel or so: * Total number of non-pseudo-packages that bugs.debian.org knows about. * Number of open bugs, in total, and for each severity, and a count of all non-wishlist, non-wontfix bugs. * Number of bugs opened or closed since the previous report. * Median and maximum times for first reply to a non-wishlist bug. * Median and maximum times since latest reply to a non-wishlist bug. * Median and maximum age of currently open bugs. * Median and maximum duration from opening to closing of closed bugs (total, and since previous report). * Number of bugs younger than a month, younger than a year, or older than a year. * Number of packages with 0 bugs, 1-5 bugs, 6-20 bugs, 21-100 bugs, more than 100 bugs. * Minimum, median, and maximum "Bogonic Quality Numbers". With the exception of the last one, I think it would be helpful in guiding ourselves to improving some aspects of the development of Debian in the right direction. The above would be published as an aggregate for all packages. In addition, it would be great for the maintainers of a package to find out how they compare to the aggregate statistics, but without publishing those. This way, there is no embarrassment or annoyance factor and people can use the statistics for their benefit, or ignore them, as suits them best. On the whole, we should be able to rely on the self-motivation of our package maintainers to do their job as well as they can. It would be unfortunate if the statistics were to be used for badgering maintainers: they should be a measurement of how the project as a whole is doing. The motivation for each number chosen for the report may be wrong for many individual packages, yet be good for the project as a whole. Therefore, judging individual packages (or maintainers) based on these numbers is unwise. The "Bogonic Quality Number" or B is calculated by the following formula: n = number of open non-wishlist, non-wontfix bugs s = size of source package (.dsc, etc) in units of 1518 bytes i = number of installations according to popcon B = n / (s*i) The lower the B number, the higher the quality of the package. (It is, of course, completely bogus, but might introduce some fun to otherwise boring statistics.) -- Debian is a beast that speaks with many voices -- Richard Braakman -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
