GCC 4.5 Release Candidate Is Coming

[Remco]

Proving program correctness is a step further than I was thinking, but I do find that interesting, too. It's a theoretical impossibility to know if a Turing complete program will reach certain states, but you can rule out certain types of failures. Program correctness is more about finding bugs than about fixing them. Finding all bugs is theoretically impossible. But fixing all found bugs is a lot easier. (OK, maybe still too difficult for practical purposes.)

As for the practical side: there would be releases, but those would then be maintenance releases for the next five years.

There is no clear distinction between a bug and a feature request of course. A missing driver would have to fall to the side of bugs. Anything that makes computers absolutely unusable is a bug.

If only the Linux ecosystem would do this, we would start losing an audience. But if the entire software industry did it, we would probably be looking at a future where bugs are virtually nonexistent. I'm not suggesting that we could do this. But it's a nice dream.

Maybe something less extreme could be accomplished, such as watching the bug list and not allowing it to grow between releases. Because if you allow it to grow, then you know for a fact that certain known bugs will never be fixed.

[V!NCENT]

Well KDE 3.5 can not mount usb storage >1TB.

Is it supposed to? My radio also can't launch a NASA satalite. Should I return it to the store?

Anyway; a bug, as we all know, came from a bug that literaly block a transistor/switch that caused a program to not execute like it used to. Today that translates to broken functionality. In other words something doesn't do what it is mean to do.

Is KDE 3.5 supposed to mount usb storage > 1TB, or is it missing the functionality to do so?

Either way... no know bugs by the KDE community... Otherwise you should file one. Maybe somebody that hates KDE4 will fix it for you

[d4ddi0]

bug-free software

No.
It is never possible to fix all bugs
Some bugs are design compromises, where you make one thing batter knowing it makes something else worse.
Some "bugs" come down to not having the expected behavior, where "expected behavior" may differ for various users.

And in real life, development doesn't happen without introducing new bugs and inconsistencies.

We do the best we can, and we live with the ones that can't be reasonably

[Remco]

No.
It is never possible to fix all bugs
Some bugs are design compromises, where you make one thing batter knowing it makes something else worse.
Some "bugs" come down to not having the expected behavior, where "expected behavior" may differ for various users.

Those would be investigated and either fixed or closed as not a bug.

I do now see a problem where your confirmed bug list could be shrinking, but now you have an enormous backlog on the unconfirmed bugs.

[tmpdir]

Maybe something less extreme could be accomplished, such as watching the bug list and not allowing it to grow between releases. Because if you allow it to grow, then you know for a fact that certain known bugs will never be fixed.

Even something sounding as simple as this is in a large software project impossible. That's why a smart dude invented MoSCoW.

[mat69]

The latest KDE 3.5.x release has no known bugs.

Not sure if this is supposed to be a joke, but where did you get that wrong information from?

The last KDE 3.5.X release had thousands of known bugs ...

[RealNC]

But there is such a thing as software without known bugs.

Yeah, and it's called "TeX".

Bugs that aren't show stoppers shouldn't prevent a release. You can look at any complex project out there. The majority of them release even with known, non-critical bugs.

[Zizzle]

Often in software engineering, fixing minor bugs can cause regressions or the introduction of major bugs.

Early in the process you define target levels for each category of bug before release.

Aiming for no known bugs is often not realistic with complex software. Each bug fix cycle introduces new bugs. You asymptotically reach 0 bugs if you are lucky. Otherwise the cycle never ends and you don't release in a timely manner.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

[KDesk]

What I mean is that there are dozens of P2 bugs still open! They only fixed for now the P1.

In GCC there are many bugs open sinece 4.0 release.

I wish LLVM, Clang and friends will reach a stable and ready to use status soon.

[V!NCENT]

Not sure if this is supposed to be a joke, but where did you get that wrong information from?

The last KDE 3.5.X release had thousands of known bugs ...

Well, I was browsing the KDE website, got to the 5.3.10 page and it said that there were no know bugs, so...