How many bugs have you fixed today?

That is the sledgehammer argument people bring up when others dare to criticize the current release process.

I think this question is nonsense. While the bug-fix rate was more or less the same since the last two releases, it looks like in this release we simply started the freeze with much more open RC-bugs than before (~3 times more RC-bugs than with Etch). So it was foreseeable that the freeze would take longer this time. We can’t solve the problem by trying to fix bugs faster, we’ve tried it several times with mediocre success. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep up fixing bugs, but we should probably accept that a certain number of people can only fix a certain number of bugs in a given time. In our case roughly 30 RC-bugs per month.

So what’s the point of asking how many RC-bugs one has fixed? Does that mean only those are allowed to make suggestions, who fixed an RC bug? That pressure doesn’t help anyone. I believe unstable being frozen for several months is a very important problem which can have drastic consequences regarding the number of our users, and we will not solve it by suggesting to fix our bugs faster.