All non-trivial software has bugs, but my point was that the RC release is looking pretty good. And of course, it all depends on the inflow of bugs. So if folks want to test out the latest 5.1 RC and find bugs, that would be helpful. Better if we find them sooner rather than later and we always appreciate the help.

Sorry it took a while to respond to this posting; I was on vacation at the time.

–Zack

So your classification of bug recalls me old Chinese taxonomy

Animals are divided into:

# those that belong to the Emperor,
# embalmed ones,
# those that are trained,
# suckling pigs,
# mermaids,
# fabulous ones,
# stray dogs,
# those included in the present classification,
# those that tremble as if they were mad,
# innumerable ones,
# those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
# others,
# those that have just broken a flower vase,
# those that from a long way off look like flies

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge’s_Taxonomy)

Explaining how Zack came to his “zero bugs” result. Defending the practice of giving different priorities to different bugs. Laughing at the absurd “zero bugs” conclusion coming from taking this practice to an extreme.

But saying that because of this “MySQL has zero bugs” is ridiculous.

Looking at the bugdb everybody can see there’re tons of bugs. There’s no way to fix them all in any reasonable time frame. What could a management do ? Categorize them. These are low-impact, for these there’s a trivial workaround, these are more an annoyance than a real bug. What’s left ? Okay, these are too difficult to fix, we cannot risk doing major changes in 5.0 or 5.1, these affect only a handful of users, these behave as documented even if it’s confusing, these behave as intended we should just document this weird behavior. What else ? Yeah, unfortunately this is a crash caused by a simple query, looks like we have to fix it. And in this one ORDER BY doesn’t seem to work, cannot declare its “not a bug”. Now let’s tag all bugs that managed to stay “real bugs” no matter how hard we tried to avoid fixing them.

And when all tagged bugs are fixed - one can proudly say “MySQL has zero bugs”. Indeed.

“The response “zarro boogs” is intended as a buggy statement itself, implying that even when no bugs have been identified, software is still likely to contain bugs that haven’t been identified yet.”