this doesn't seem good attitude for critical software like database
this doesn't seem good attitude for critical software like database
Seatback entertainment in aircraft are not critical. Aircraft are.
In Postgres, there are plenty low-priority, low-impact bugs. #16265, for instance, reports that the capitalization of a relation in an error message is confusing. The report got mostly ignored. And that seems not a great loss.
Dare I say, solving every bug does not make economic sense.
Until it is. Swiss Air Flight 111 went down with 229 lives lost because of a new infotainment system whose electrical cables started sparkling.
Yes, not every part of a critical system is critical. Determining which is which is a complicated task, though, as parts interact. Not too long ago (and by this I mean within my lifetime), we were ignorant enough about our own bodies to think that our microbiota was almost irrelevant to our health and that bad teeth were mostly a cosmetic problem.
Back to IT, Heartbleed was caused by addition of a feature that looked as harmless as you could think of. But it wasn't.
Judging real critical-ness of bugs is hard. Yeah, capitalization of an error message is likely harmless, but I would treat, say, any buffer overflow as serious.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c22286ad6268347c6...
why would the optimal amount of bugs be anything less for a database?