Bug reports after releases (was: Re: Bug with long multiline strings?)

[Axel Beckert <abe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 08:59:28PM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I imagine Peter is getting rather tired of crash bugs getting found and
> fixed only days after he does a release.

Well, trigger was likely the fact that this bug had some activity on
Ubuntu's Launchpad after someone was able to reproduce it with 5.0.5
in Debian.

Since that bug had multiple reports which weren't merged, I started to
review _all_ segfault causing bugs reported in Debian and Ubuntu for
duplicates, and secondarily also for not being forwarded to
zsh-workers, but reproducible. Hence that bunch of forwarded bugs this
weekend.

We recently had that topic of bugs being found _after_ releases (or in
case of distributions after uploads of binary packages) also on
#pkg-zsh (Freenode IRC network, home of Debian's zsh packages) and we
came to the conclusion that it's quite common: Once a release is done,
it triggers a bunch of activity which again triggers a bunch of
bug-reports. This can be nicely seen in the zsh 5.0.x releases: 5.0.0
lasted long, 5.0.1 didn't. 5.0.2 lasted long, 5.0.3 and 5.0.4 didn't.

"-test" releases help, but only reach a small (but active) group.
Uploading just to http://www.zsh.org/pub/ but not SourceForge and
sending the announcement only to zsh-workers/-users and not
zsh-announce clearly helps further as seen with 5.0.3 and 5.0.4. But
some corner-case issues are only found after a release is out or even
only after it propagated into the stable releases of some popular
Linux or BSD distributions... (Yeah, somehow this feels like boiling
down to "release early, release often". :-)

But back to the current situation: All those recently fixed bug
reports about crashes (at least those reports where I was involved)
are bugs which exist for quite a long time (over 1 year at least), so
I don't think there's any kind of urgency to make a new release just
because of them. (Of course I wouldn't mind if they would trigger a
release. :-)

</braindump>

		Kind regards, Axel
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