Hi, RMS has been bugging the Steering Committee about the the bug backlog; he is worried about its size. In trying to put together some answers for him, I was struggling with the fact that it is very difficult to tell, with four open lines of development (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3), which bugs are in which versions, and to distinguish shipping bugs from development bugs. For any individual bug, you can usually tell by reading the entire Bugzilla history, but this isn't feasible when dealing with several hundred.
We actually have fields that are supposed to answer this question: "Known to Fail" and "Known to Work". However, these fields are not being set in a consistent manner, and aren't being updated when the situation changes. I'd like to get to the point where I can quickly get an answer to questions like "How many P1 bugs affect gcc-4.1.1". I think the cleanest way to do that is to at least have correct Known to work/fail status for the most serious bugs, for the most recent release (ideally all release branches as well). It will be a big job to clean this up, but I'd like to ask maintainers to try to remember to update these fields when a bug is fixed on a given branch. Also, when reviewing the status of a given bug, if you can make Known to work/Known to fail more accurate, please do. Because there are so many open bugs, it's probably best to start with the P1 bugs.
