Some kind of a record

Today we closed two bugs in wxWidgets. Nothing surprising so far, except if you look at the bug numbers and realize that they are two thousand something while the latest ticket in the Trac is 16379. And these bugs were both opened more than 9 years ago, in February and May 2005 respectively. I'm sure that the fact that we are fixing bugs 10 years later must mean something, I'm just not sure what exactly. Do we not care enough about bugs to fix them so late? Do we care very much about them, enough to still fix them after all this time? Are we hopefully short on resources? Are we just very good at allocating our meagre resources efficiently so as to combine both bug fixing and still making some progress (which would never happen if we decided to not add any features until all existing bugs are fixed)? All of the above?

One thing is clear though: please keep reporting bugs in wxWidgets and if they seem to be ignored, know that there is always hope that they will be fixed one day. Next status report coming in 2050...

Self flattering statistics

After receiving the latest monthly Source Forge newsletter with their list of top 25 projects I became curious because at first glance it had seemed like most of them were Web-based applications and I wondered if it really was so. So I spent 10 minutes clicking on all the 25 links and quickly looking at the programming languages/environments/frameworks these projects used and here is what I found (please bear in mind that I could easily make some errors, all this is very quick and rough):

1. http://www.phpmyadmin.net/: Web/PHP


2. http://adempiere.sourceforge.net/: Java


3. http://www.zkoss.org/: Java


4. http://arianne.sf.net/: Java


5. http://www.finkproject.org/: Perl(?)


6. http://portableapps.com/: Python


7. http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/: C++/wx (and Qt?)


8. http://jmri.sourceforge.net/: Java


9. http://www.net-snmp.org/: C


10. http://www.scummvm.org/: C++


11. http://www.taskcoach.org/: Python/wx


12. http://www.xoops.org/: Web/PHP


13. http://squirrelmail.org/: Web/PHP


14. http://postbooks.sourceforge.net/: C++/Qt


15. http://www.openbravo.com/: Java


16. http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/: C


17. http://www.freedos.org/: C


18. http://pwsafe.org/: C++/wx


19. http://getgreenshot.org/: C#


20. http://www.omegat.org/: Java


21. http://tuxpaint.org/: C/SDL


22. http://www.dvdstyler.org/: C++/wx


23. http://keepass.info/: C++/MFC


24. http://www.dvtk.org/: C++ (?)


25. http://www.scintilla.org/: C++

As you can see, actually my initial impression was totally wrong and there are only 3 web-based applications (incidentally, all written in PHP) whereas there are twice as many written in Java. What really surprised me, however, was that 4 of them used wxWidgets (although I'm not sure if it's the main UI used by MediaInfo as it also seems to use Qt). I knew about DVDStyler but not the other ones so it was a pleasant surprise.

Of course, I have no idea what are the exact criteria for choosing these 25 "top" projects and there are plenty of Open Source projects not hosted on SourceForge, without even speaking about all the other ones, and so on but, still, it seems like wxWidgets is more popular than I thought (and otherwise I wouldn't have written this post, would I?).