Bug tracking (was: new *Help* argument highlighting)

[Juanma Barranquero <jmbarranquero@wke.es>]

On Thu, 13 May 2004 11:45:32 -0400
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> Savannah has some sort of bug-tracking facility, but I have never used
> it and I don't know how it works.  Does someone else want to find out?

I see no bug tracking facility on Savannah, but perhaps I didn't look at
the right places.

Still, the question remains: should we use some kind of issue tracker?

Currently we have an etc/TODO, which is sort of half wish list, half
grab bag of heterogeneous items.  I'm all for using an issue tracker, if
only because it makes easier to know where we are, release-wise, for any
given release.  For example, what's precluding us from doing a
prerelease tarball just today (not that I'm proposing it, of course)?
My guess is that a mix of:

  - Outstanding bugs (each one known to a few developers, the ones more
    interested or knowledgeable on the issue)

  - Pending documentation for new features

  - Undecided status of several patches (dynamic loading, currying,
    overridable faces, etc.)

  - Lack of consensus for the release number (OK, that's only
    half-serious :)

  - Uncertainty about where we stand right now

Of course, issue tracking systems have other advantages than I'm not
going to repeat here, unrelated to whether we're trying to do a release
right now or not.  Almost every serious free or open source project out
there uses one form or another of issue tracking.  We should do it, not
to follow suit, but for the intrinsic gain.

I said a while back that IMHO we should be a more structured project, in
the sense of having a plan for releases, with tentative dates, perhaps
even a release manager, etc.  Someone (Eli, I think, but I'm speaking
from memory) opposed on the grounds that it costs human resources that
we don't have.  But the Emacs project has 87 registered developers;
that's 33% more than Subversion, for example, and they seem to be doing
well on that regard (though, to be fair, they have four or five people
paid to work almost full-time on Subversion).

OTOH, perhaps I'm the only one that feels that way, and I'm just pissing
out my turf...

                                                                Juanma