A good bug reporting system, by being good, can make a project look bad.
In five-or-so years on SourceForge, xmlroff garnered 24 bug reports. In the couple of months since moving everything to xmlroff.org, xmlroff has already amassed over 60 Trac tickets.
It may look as if xmlroff is suddenly much buggier, but it’s due to finally having a bug reporting system that’s easy to use.
Because it’s easier to use, we use it more. There’s been tickets for moving to xmlroff.org and for pie-in-the-sky ideas like a Texinfo-XML-to-FO stylesheet as well as for common or garden bugs. Since it’s also easy to link to bug reports, there’s now more ticket numbers in the notes on test results and in commit messages.
The proliferating tickets and ticket references point to quality improving, not worsening. After all, we’ve also closed more tickets than xmlroff had bug reports while on SourceForge.