Re: bug tracking

[Thomas Weber]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 02:53:50PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> I'm bringing up this issue again because I think we really must do
> something about bug tracking.
> 
> We (sort of) tried the savannah tracker briefly.  My impression is
> that no one liked it very much.  So unless someone says otherwise, I
> don't think that it will work for us.
> 
> Likewise for the  Debian bug tracker.
> 
> At one time, I think Thomas Weber was planning to set up a bug
> reporting system (correct me if I'm wrong).  I'm not sure whether he
> did.  I don't remember trying it out.

Yes. Yes. No. 
I did setup an instance of roundup, but didn't really finish it. The
biggest problem was the fact that the main point for bug discussion
should be the mailing list. 

This is a problem for every tracker, so if possible, you should loosen
that prerequisite.

IOW, the contact address for a bug is the tracker. It can forward mails
to a list, but the list is not the primary address anymore.

> I have now set up an instance of bugzilla at bugs.octave.org.  We
> could use this.  On the plus side, it is bugzilla, which is a fairly
> comprehensive, well known, and widely used bug reporting system.  Some
> negatives that I can see:
> 
>   * Requires creating an account and logging in to report bugs.  Will
>     this prevent people from reporting problems?  I guess it does not
>     pose too much of a problem for other projects.  For example, the
>     bugzilla databases for Firefox and GCC appear to have plenty of
>     reports in them...

The main reason why trackers require an account is valid contact data.
By sending mails back and forth, you are sure that you can reach the
submitter. Mail-based systems don't need that much info, for obvious
reasons.

>   * Using email to receive and process bug reports is not the norm
>     with bugzilla, and that will be a big change for me at least as
>     I'm very accustomed to handling bugs by email, not via some web
>     form.  In the past, I have said that being able to handle bugs
>     using email was essential to me, but now I think I could maybe get
>     past this problem in exchange for having a good database of bug
>     reports.  At this point, I'm much more interested in having a
>     database of reports since the current method of keeping track of
>     outstanding reports in an email folder is just not working
>     anymore.
> 
> Whatever we choose (and I do think we must choose something) we will
> need to start pointing people to the new system.  That means changing
> the web site, manual, etc.  We will also need to rewrite the
> bug_report function to just save info to a file and tell people to
> paste that info in to the bug report form on the web.  I expect the
> switch will take some time, and since it requires changes to the docs
> and the bug_report function, I think we need to make these changes
> before the next stable release.
> 
> Comments?

I would re-visit the usage problems with the Savannah tracker. Why
didn't people use it. Bug submitters didn't use it as they were pointed
to the mailing list in about every document, but why didn't the
developers use the bug tracker?

        Thomas