Impromptu bugathon

Yesterday, prompted by the threat of reaching 5000 active bug reports several developers began fixing and closing.

As of this writing the count of active PRs has dropped from 4976 to 4893 -- that's 83 resolved -- and quite a few more have been placed in submitter feedback awaiting confirmation that they are in fact fixed.

This is a positive step, and a pretty big number for a single day that wasn't a previously scheduled bugathon. Unfortunately, to clear through the backlog we'd have to do this much every single day for two full months.

Despite all the cleanup work over the past year and a half, the database is still full of reports of already-fixed problems. These not only inflate the total counts; they get in the way and make it harder to find real problems to work on. Finding and closing them needs to be a group effort.

If you're a developer: when you fix a problem please include the PR number in the commit message so it gets pulled into the database; also, please close PRs that you fix, or leave a comment explaining what still needs to be done (e.g. pullups, real fixes vs. quick hacks, etc.)

If you're a user: if you have filed a bug report and it's been fixed, but the report is still open, please follow up to let us know it can be closed. And also, note that GNATS is particular about followups: they need to be sent to gnats-bugs AT netbsd.org (not gnats-admin) and the Subject: line needs to begin with "Re:" and the category and bug number in the form "port-eniac/12345". Other followups are likely to be dropped as spam, or may end up opening a new PR instead. In any event, if you send a followup and you don't get a copy back from GNATS, it probably got lost. If you can't figure out what's wrong, post to the netbsd-bugs mailing list.

And finally, if you are tired of the Gnats search interface you may find these lists helpful... but be aware that they often don't update very rapidly as there are manual steps involved.