Re: [Axiom-developer] Under-appreciated aspects of literate programming

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 08/06/2016 02:51 AM, Tim Daly wrote:
> Fixed bugs seem uninteresting. Several things failed on my car, for 
> instance, that were fixed. There is rarely the need to revisit 
> failures, except possibly in regression tests, like brakes :-)

I don't understand your comment. You are in favour of even writing a
book about the bugs in AXIOM and complain about documenting fixed bugs?
Do I misunderstand something?

> Except for release notes, why would anyone want to know about fixed 
> bugs? At most someone running an old version might want to know.

Not everyone is always up-to-date with the latest version of the
program. Of course, it would be good if developers can tell of a
misbehaviour of the program is because of the old version and that the
bug is already fixed in a newer version.

Furthermore, a bugfix is not always a bugfix. It might fix the
misbehaviour, but at the same time introduce another misbehaviour,
because the bugfixer did not completely understand that part of the
program. Then it would be good for the next developer (or even for the
same developer---since people tend to forget) to know the underlying
assumptions for the old bugfix.

> On the other hand, a known bug is an intrinsic part of the system 
> (mis-)behavior and is something worth noting. Why would you want to 
> keep that in, say github?

If you understood my argument, I actually have nothing against putting
bugs into the same repo, but my suggestion is more that they live on a
disconnected DAG and not directly in the DAG of the source code commits.
I think bugs have a different life cycle than source code.

> Axiom has a git repo at savannah, sourceforge, and axiom-developer.
> Which of these should be "the master bug list?".

As with git, one has to declare one to be the master repo. It's only a
small thing to declare one bugtracker as the master. And if the
bugtracker would manage the bugs via git in a separate DAG, then one
could also have the bugs offline. It would probably a bit of a problem
to merge different (half-on/half-offline) discussion lines about a bug,
but I consider that a problem of the specific bugtracker tool.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a nice and easy to use bugtracker with
underlying git.

> It is mildly surprising that the tools to maintain repos (e.g. git) 
> don't have "git bugnote" or some such support built in. Or at least
> a "git bugfetch" to get the current bug list.

True. I think that https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes is also not the
right thing.

Maybe http://bugseverywhere.org/ is close to what I have in mind, but
I've never tried it and it looks unmaintained (same for ticgit-ng
https://github.com/jeffWelling/ticgit).

Ralf