Announcing the GHC Bug Sweep

Help us weed the GHC ticket database, and get a warm fuzzy feeling from contributing to Haskell core technology! There are currently ~750 tickets against GHC. Many of them have not been looked at in months or years. Often when I go through old tickets I find easy targets: bugs that have already been fixed, duplicates, bugs that are not reproducible and the submitter has gone away. So the idea we have is this: do an incremental sweep of the whole database, starting from the oldest tickets. Check each one, and try to make some progress on it. If we get enough momentum going we can make sure every ticket gets looked at every few months at the least. This is a game for the whole family! We don't care how much progress you make on each ticket, just as long as someone has taken a look and moved the ticket forward in some way. For example, you might check for duplicates, update the metadata, ask for more information from the submitter, try to reproduce the bug against the latest version of GHC. To claim a ticket all you have to do is remove it from the list on the wiki. Full instructions are here http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BugSweep including a list of suggestions for ways to make progress on a ticket. Cheers! Simon & the GHC team

Simon Marlow wrote:
This is a game for the whole family! We don't care how much progress you make on each ticket, just as long as someone has taken a look and moved the ticket forward in some way. For example, you might check for duplicates, update the metadata, ask for more information from the submitter, try to reproduce the bug against the latest version of GHC.
To claim a ticket all you have to do is remove it from the list on the wiki. Full instructions are here
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BugSweep
including a list of suggestions for ways to make progress on a ticket.
I've taken a look at a ticket and I think it should be closed as invalid, but I hesitate to make that decision on behalf of the GHC developers. What should I do in these circumstances, just draw it to your attention? I have added a comment to the ticket explaining why. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/29 is the ticket in question. Ganesh =============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html ===============================================================================

On 17/11/2009 09:49, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
Simon Marlow wrote:
This is a game for the whole family! We don't care how much progress you make on each ticket, just as long as someone has taken a look and moved the ticket forward in some way. For example, you might check for duplicates, update the metadata, ask for more information from the submitter, try to reproduce the bug against the latest version of GHC.
To claim a ticket all you have to do is remove it from the list on the wiki. Full instructions are here
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BugSweep
including a list of suggestions for ways to make progress on a ticket.
I've taken a look at a ticket and I think it should be closed as invalid, but I hesitate to make that decision on behalf of the GHC developers. What should I do in these circumstances, just draw it to your attention? I have added a comment to the ticket explaining why.
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/29 is the ticket in question.
I agree. I think we kept the ticket open in the past because there are limited cases where you might be able to do something (e.g. if the type is known to be Int, then you know the properties of '<', '==' etc.), But that's far too vague for a ticket, and it's not clear that it's a good idea, being limited to built-in types and operations. Cheers, Simon

On 16/11/2009 16:29, Simon Marlow wrote:
Help us weed the GHC ticket database, and get a warm fuzzy feeling from contributing to Haskell core technology!
There are currently ~750 tickets against GHC. Many of them have not been looked at in months or years. Often when I go through old tickets I find easy targets: bugs that have already been fixed, duplicates, bugs that are not reproducible and the submitter has gone away.
So the idea we have is this: do an incremental sweep of the whole database, starting from the oldest tickets. Check each one, and try to make some progress on it. If we get enough momentum going we can make sure every ticket gets looked at every few months at the least.
This is a game for the whole family! We don't care how much progress you make on each ticket, just as long as someone has taken a look and moved the ticket forward in some way. For example, you might check for duplicates, update the metadata, ask for more information from the submitter, try to reproduce the bug against the latest version of GHC.
To claim a ticket all you have to do is remove it from the list on the wiki. Full instructions are here
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BugSweep
including a list of suggestions for ways to make progress on a ticket.
Thanks to all those who have helped out so far. The bug database now has fewer bugs than a couple of days ago (we're now at 738). It's not much, but we're heading in the right direction. Cheers, Simon
participants (2)
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Simon Marlow
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Sittampalam, Ganesh