This report is impressive… receiving 7,872 new reports and resolving 7,802 bug reports in a single month while continuing to hold a backlog of 46,000 open bugs!  This says two things to me… they have a process for triaging and resolving bugs and they have a tremendous amount of people actively reporting issues.

In the past I’ve been skeptical about the size and effectiveness of Ubuntu’s community because the only evidence usually cited is distrowatch.com, googletrends, and glowing reports (I assumed biased) from Canonical employees at live events.  I’ve never heard any hard numbers at the live events, just lots of enthusiasm about how things are “getting bigger and better” and that “collecting good data is hard”.

I think these bug stats are a great first step and show a lot of involvement and hard work.  I wonder what the average run rate is per month?  Is this regular monthly activity or the results of a special event for the recent release?  I found a few more stats, but nothing that showed a corresponding monthly close rate.  Without reporting the number of bugs closed each month it is hard to get a full picture.

These are Fedora’s run rates for the past year.  For greater perspective look at the graph here.

I tend to think that comparing Fedora to Ubuntu as distros is an invalid comparison.  Both projects have very different business and support models combined with different purposes.  One thing both projects have in common is community.  I am told that Ubuntu’s bug process is primarily community driven and this led me to wonder what Fedora can learn from Ubuntu about bug triage and bug handling.

Because I think there is enormous value in making sure our bug database is current and that we identify and track important release blocker bugs, I’ve been working for the past ten months to help jump start the Fedora bug triage process.  We have made some good strides, but I think we are capable of more.  Think what we could do with the remaining untriaged NEW rawhide bugs if we had more than three or four people at our weekly meetings?  We need to energize our existing community and draw in new people to triage bugs, but the things we have tried to date haven’t gotten us very far.

If you have new ideas or want to help make a difference in Fedora, please join us at our weekly bug triage meeting on IRC, each Tuesday at 15:00 UTC (10 AM EST).  We meet on the #fedora-meeting channel of irc.freenode.net.