Criteria for identifying must-fix bugs

[Rik]

10/9/13

Maintainers,

As part of the release cycle, we will need to fix some number of critical
bugs.  However, before diving into coding we need some criteria for
identifying which bugs must be fixed versus which ones would simply be nice
to fix.

I issued a call for new bug reports today with a due date one week from
now.  So, we have a week to figure things out amongst ourselves which
shouldn't be that hard.

Previously, we used the criteria of any bug report with a Severity >= 4 or
any Item Group == Regression.  For starters, I have put those up on the 3.8
bug fix list (http://wiki.octave.org/3.8_Bug_Fix_List).

Additional items we might want to consider are Item Group == Crash, since
even with bad input the interpreter should never segfault.  But there are
29 items with this property so this may be too many to fix and still
release Octave within a reasonable time frame.

Another possible criteria would be Item Group == Build Failure since we
would like to fix just those sorts of errors before making release
candidates which we hope will build on multiple platforms.

Finally, after any new bug reports come in we probably need to glance
through the entire list and elevate any bugs to Severity >= 4 that should
be included in this release.  Mike Miller has been doing a good job of
triaging some of the ancient bug reports, but we probably all need to chip
in during the release cycle.

Cheers,
Rik