[Python-Dev] Stability Metrics (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter Anthony Baxter anthony@interlink.com.au
Fri, 12 Apr 2002 22:55:05 +1000

The number itself is meaningless as a stability indicator; Skip's suggestion is that the number should drop with successive releases as the unfixed bugs get more and more obscure. So 2.2.1 fixes 140 bugs, and 2.2.2 fixes 70, and 2.2.3 fixes 15, and so on.

Counting bugfixes is also meaningless because a high bug count could also indicate either someone's found a new way to identify bugs (e.g a working purify) or else there's been a period of stability which people have used to walk through and fix those old, horrible cases.

Anthony