Closing 10% of all Emacs bugs

Hey! Target reached:

Bragging time! I mean, this is the irregular Emacs update … stats … report… thing…

So, I’m gamifying Emacs development by setting myself a goal of closing (i.e., fixing, triaging, etc) 10% of the Emacs bugs, and since the trend is downwards:

That’s fewer bugs each time. (But harder bugs, so it evens out.) This time it was just 327 bugs… unfortunately, we started at 3270 bugs, but ended up at just 3110, which anybody with a slide rule can see isn’t 327 bugs less than 3270. (How much more I have no idea; I’m not a mathematician.)

I guess people… have just been reporting more bugs lately? Or something? I don’t think all the other people involved with Emacs development have been slacking off, so I think so… Hm… hard to tell from those charts.

In this batch I mainly concentrated on getting submitted, but neglected patches installed. I did this by downloading all the bugs and just grepping for patches — there were about 500 of them that hadn’t been tagged as “patch” (half because they weren’t good patches and half because … just because). So how did that affect the number of contributors:

*gasp*

So from like 40 per month to 95 in September. And for completeness, here’s the number of commits per month:

But now I’ve gone through all the patches, so I guess I’ll have to… *shiver*… start fixing bugs myself! Oh the humanity.

Speaking of which, what I’ve been working on lately is trying to make basic Emacs Lisp functions more discoverable. Taking the s.el as a model. According to Reddit, it’s apparently the Platonic ideal in documentation: Just a list of functions with some examples so that you can see what they do.

You enter the new doc thing most easily via the normal help system, like `C-h f string-join RET’:

Hit enter on that link and:

Eh, the look may need some tweaking…

I saw somebody on Reddit describing reading the Emacs documentation as being forced to read an academic treatise… and I sympathise. I think thorough documentation is important, but sometimes you don’t want to read about all the subtleties and edge cases, but just want a I HAVE A STRING HERE JUST FUCKING TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH IT list of functions.

I hope this helps. Skimming these shortdocs is probably more efficient than watching a Youtube tutorial, which, I gather, is the other preferred method of learning computer things.

Kids these days! Get off my lawn!

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