Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eric S. Raymond writes:

 > > I think it's appealing to have a checkout of the bug database available
 > > alongside a source code checkout.  Bugs Everywhere is not finished yet,
 > > but can use many different VCS backends including arch, bzr and hg.
 > > I have a small patch to add GIT support to it, too.
 > 
 > This sounds interesting.  How close would you say it is to production status?

Interesting, yes, but a word of caution: a bug database is like a
market.  Markets are most useful when *every* bid and ask is
published.  As soon as you allow secret dealing, things become less
liquid.  Similarly, unless bugs are more or less automatically pushed
to the public interface, it's not going to be as useful for
communicating with casual users and developers.  The easiest and least
invasive way to achieve automatic pushing is to have only the public
interface for bug entry.

Of course the motivations for "secrecy" are personal profit in the
market and "laziness" in the bug tracker, but the chilling effects on
information flow will be qualitatively similar.  Quantitatively?  "Try
it and see."  But be prepared with Plan B.