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

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@floss.red-bean.com>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:
> It's critical, IMO -- my experience of using mozilla and savannah's bug
> tracker is that the annoyance of having to go to the web site and muddle
> through the forms significantly decreased the likelihood that I would bother
> (it was fine the first N times, but after a while I started to dread it).

Note that filing bugs by email significantly increases the likelihood
of duplicate issues.  

One of the advantages of going to the web site is that you can first
search to see if the bug already exists in the database.  Whereas if
you fire off an email, there's no query step.  Sure, the editing
environment for an email is better -- Emacs buffer, rather than web
form -- but the web forms *are* also a realtime database front end,
and that makes a difference too.

I'm not sure what interface made you "muddle through forms".  In my
experience, if you're filing a new bug, there's one form to fill out,
and if you're modifying an existing bug, then you just go to a URL and
make the appropriate change.  It's not that hard; I certainly don't
dread it.

Administering existing bugs by email would be nice, of course.  For
example, I'd like to be able to respond to an email sent by the issue
tracker, and have my response cause some new change to the bug.  But
lack of this feature is hardly a showstopper.

Please, let's not aim for perfection, that way lies madness.  Some
issue tracker is better than no issue tracker, and if one sets up the
appropriate bookmarks and URLs, one should never have to muddle
through multiple forms to get things done.

-Karl