Qt Developers Discuss What To Do With All Their "P1" Priority Bugs

While Qt 6.0 is aiming to ship in December there are many open bugs against the Qt code-base. Given the increasing number of P1 priority bug reports that are the highest besides the "P0" build breakage bug reports, developers are discussing what to do with these bugs and the merits of their current priority classifications.

Jason McDonald began a discussion today over the long-lived P1 issues. He notes that Qt currently has 1,175 open P1 issues in their bug tracker. Of those 1,175 bugs, about half of them at 583 have been open for more than one year and some 342 bugs were opened two years ago. 175 of those bugs are more than three years ago. So for being "P1" priority issues, Qt sure has many open bugs lingering around for extended periods of time. Thus he questions if a P1 issue is really a priority if it stays open for more than one year.

Some developers like Qt's Ulf Hermann argue that the priority field is meaningless but other fields like "fix version" should take more priority. He even believes that they should just drop the priority tag from bug reports.

Other developers though find the priority listings useful when it comes to finding new bugs to squash. Some others also feel that indeed the priority handling should be re-classified to make P1 as the priority for release blocker bugs. And, yes, the matter of many Qt bugs not even being triaged and sorted out in a timely manner was also raised.

The mailing list discussion is still so young but we'll keep monitoring and see if they ultimately opt for reorganizing the Qt bug priority tracking or any other changes to better handle the growing number of unaddressed Qt bug reports.