[Bitcoin-development] Seeking advice: Encouraging bug-fixing over new features

[Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail.com>]

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Anybody have advice on how to encourage more bug-fixing and testing of
existing functionality instead of yet-more-features?

When I get back home from here in Australia I plan on trying to
lead-by-example by starting to tackle the huge backlog of reported bugs, but
I'd like to know if anybody has seen other open source projects successfully
get people to fix bugs instead of constantly adding features. Would policies
like "that spiffy new feature you want won't be considered until you've
helped close some open bugs" be effective (or would it just encourage people
to create shill accounts to open trivial-to-fix issues)?

If this was your run-of-the-mill open source project I would be much
more lackadaisical about letting in new features... but when people lose
money because bugs slip through (and several people HAVE recently lost money
because of bugs slipping through) we obviously have a pretty big problem
just making sure that the features we have now work properly.

(Thanks VERY much to those of you have HAVE been helping test and have been
submitting bug fixes; I don't mean to imply that everybody has been
feature-happy, just that it seems like a lot of potential bitcoin
contributors start out by submitting a nifty new feature that sure would be
nice to have if we weren't so busy trying to make sure the features we
already have work properly all the time).

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Gavin Andresen

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