Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

[snip]

> Supremely important is that the new tools must be customizable to suit
> the way ANY of us work.

Even for the small team of regular committers, I doubt all of you are
100% happy with the tools you are using and would prefer something else
for some task.

The problem with refusing to give up a bit of your comfort is that you
may produce an uncomfortable environment for others. IMHO, one of the
problems with Emacs is its failure attracting new hackers.

It is clear to me that a DVCS would make Emacs hacking more fun for
current project members, and a good bug tracker would be very useful and
just a little bit annoying for you. With this facilities, from the
outside, Emacs would appear as a more open and participative project.

[snip]

>> I was thinking about this possibility and concluded that it is not
>> possible to build a decent bug-tracking system using only a VCS. The
>> reason is the importance of the user interface, which must be open to
>> everybody, not only for the committers, as PROBLEMS and TODO are now,
>> thus effectively dissuading possible contributions from the outside.
>
> OK, VCS access IN ADDITION TO web access.  How about that?

Others just proposed such a system. I'm skeptical about it. So far, it
seems quite limiting and for a good reason:

>> Furthermore, a bug-tracking system needs a database and a VCS is not
>> good at that.
>
> That is a good argument for staying with an email based system.  ;-(
> What's the point of a bug system if you have to be online to use it?  It
> kind of cancels out the benefit of a dVCS for our other files.
>
> Are you telling me I won't be able to grep a bug-tracking database?  If
> I'm using such a database, I want instant response when I press <CR> to
> look at an item.  I want to be able to do M-x occur (or the like) on it,
> without going through some ghastly GUI interface.  I want regexp
> searching, filtering with a "command line"-like interface (e.g., like
> mutt has), and so on.  And I want the database on my own hard disk, for
> speed and flexibility.

You can request a plain-text export of the database.

-- 
Oscar