Re: bug tracking

[Jameson Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net>]

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Hi, Carl.  Thanks for the reply on this issue.  Please permit me counter
with a couple points.

On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:31:05 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:
> It seems to me that almost all issues of interest are already raised on
> this mailing list, and later followed up with a message from me, (along
> the lines of "thanks, this is pushed"). So I'd be happy with a system
> that relied on an email interface as well.

Issues are raised on the mailing list, because there's no where else to
raise them (other than irc, where they're not actually logged).  But
there's currently no way to track issues.  We can't tell if they've been
dealt with, and we have no way of browsing through them.  Folks who send
issues to the list have no feedback that their issue has even been
acknowledged.

Saying that issues sent to the list are usually followed by a "thanks,
pushed" implies that only issues that include patches are acknowledged.
While I certainly appreciate that this is a Free software project and
that users should be encouraged to contribute, I don't think it's wise
to imply that "only issues with patches will be acknowledged".  I think
that all users should be encouraged to report issues, even those that
are not capable or currently able to supply patches.

> What I don't want is something that would make me go push buttons in a
> web form in addition to the "git push" and sending of email that I'm
> already doing.

I agree that purely web-based solutions are crappy.  But many now
include email interfaces as well.  In any event, this is why I was
suggesting one of the new distributed issue trackers that can live
inside the repo of the source code and integrate well with our/your
current workflow.  I just haven't used any of them to be able to vouch
for them.

> My primary metric for adopting a new issue tracker is "how little extra
> work will I have to do to use this compared to what I'm already
> doing?". That's a lot more important to me than how the system stores
> its data.

I don't think I agree that that's the right question to ask.  We're
currently not tracking issues at, particularly ones not accompanied by
patches, so I claim that we have to do something different.  Doing
nothing at all leaves us with a continued problem.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

jamie.

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