I guess quite a lot, but in this case I am specifically thinking about the open bugs in all PEAR packages. Now this number is impressive, since there are actually over 400 packages in PEAR. That means there are less than 1 open bug per package! At the same time PEAR is coming in at about half a million downloads per month.
A lot of people have been involved in a, while not formally organized but still very visible, push to reduce the bug count since last summer. Back then our bug count was well over 1 bug per package. The latest bug killing efforts by Jan to fix up and release a new version of the SOAP package now got things below 400 open bugs for the first time in quite a while.
Now these numbers should be examined even further. There are actually only 4 or 5 packages that have double digit open bug reports. Do not that with open bug reports in this case I do not only mean the bugs listed as "open" in the bug stats page, but also those that are assigned, verified or in any other unresolved state like closed, bogus, no feedback etc.
The biggest contributor to the overall bug count actually has more than 1/8 of all open bug reports. This is the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer package. Unfortunately it currently lacks an active maintainer. Even still it is still quite useful as long as you don't hit one of its current limitations. I have actually used it production on a project 2 years ago.
A final thing to keep in mind is that PEAR actually remains responsible for all packages ever brought into PEAR. There are a select few packages that have been marked deprecated. The most known example is the DB package. But even that package is still seeing bug fixes and got a new release not too long ago. I hope this again makes it clear why PEAR has good reasons to not let in just any package. Without going into the details, the obvious reason is that since PEAR takes over the responsibility over any code even if the original developer has lost interest, it is important to choose wisely what to adopt in order to not have needless redundancy that just dilutes the QA resources.
So congrats to everybody who has been part of making PEAR such a high quality project with such a level of commitment to its end users!
Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and OLE might get alive again:
http://news.php.net/php.internals/27625
