Re: What do you want me to do?

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 18:37, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Robert Treat wrote:
> >On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 15:28, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> >>Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> >>>On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Robert Treat wrote:
> >>>>I know most people have talked about using bugzilla, but is anyone
> >>>>familiar with GNATS? I'm currently rereading Open Sources and there's a
> >>>>paragraph or two mentioning it's use and the fact that it can be
> >>>>interfaced with completely by email.
> >>>>
> >>>FreeBSD uses it almost exclusively and it supports email interaction with
> >>>the database, but I don't think there are very many good GUI front ends
> >>>for it (or, at least, not that I've seen) ...
> >>>
> >>No.
> >
> >personal axe to grind?
> >
>
> er, no. I was only agreeing with Marc about GUI interfaces. What axe to
> grind do you imagine I could have?

sorry, i just wondered because you gave a one word response dismissing
the idea and moved on...

>
> >I've never used it, but it's been around a long
> >time, allows for interaction completely through email (which is how we
> >do things now), has a web front end for anyone who wants to use it to
> >use, and as i understand it has a tcl based desktop app for folks to use
> >as well. seems it's being dismissed prematurely imho.
> >
> Every person wishing to submit a bug will have to have send-pr installed
> or else we'll get lots of reports not broken up into fields. That
> doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me.
>

not really... we can still have a web interface to it, so anyone
submitting a bug could use the web interface. now maybe for regular
folks working on bugs this would be an issue.. don't know, i'm not
familiar send-pr...

> >
> >>A few other thoughts:
> >>. the Samba team have apparently abandoned their own tool and moved to
> >>bugzilla
> >>. if we used bugzilla this might give some impetus to the bugzilla
> >>team's efforts to provide pg as a backend (maybe we could help with that)
> >>. it would seem slightly strange to me for an RDBMS project to use a bug
> >>tracking system that was not RDBMS-backed
> >>
> >>
> >
> >we serve far more static pages on the website than we do database driven
> >ones...
> >
> *nod* but there has been talk of moving to bricolage, hasn't there?
>

if only because it outputs static content...

> >the software we distribute is housed on fileservers and sent via
> >ftp, we dont expect people to store and retrieve it from a database...
> >
>
> you're reaching now ...
>
> >our mailing lists software actually uses another db product in fact...
> >let's just get the right tool for the job...
> >
>
> Yes. I agree. Bugs (including enhancements) strike me as a classic case
> of data that belongs in a database.
>

i think it's something that needs to be searchable, whether that
requires "the worlds most powerful open source object relational
database management system" is something else entirely ;-)

> >
> >
> >>. developers are far more likely to be familiar with bugzilla
> >
> >developers are far more likely to be familiar with windows and mysql as
> >well...
> >
>
> c'mon ...
>
your strawman meets my strawman...

> >
> >>. are there any active developers without web access? If not, why is
> >>pure email interaction important?
> >>
> >
> >for the same reason mailing lists work better than message boards...
> >it's just easier. i'm much more likely to read an email list the scroll
> >through web forms, and if i am going to respond to a bug report, i'm
> >much mroe likely to if i can hit "reply" and start typing than if i have
> >to fire up a browser to do it.
> >
>
> Tom explicitly said he *didn't* want a system where email poured
> straight into the bugtrack db.
>

Which I find odd since thats essentially the system we have now...

> Yes, it is a different way of doing things, and it takes getting used to.
>
> >
> >>Bugzilla is far from perfect. But it's getting better.
> >>
> >
> >don't get me wrong, i like bugzilla and all, but theres no need to put
> >blinders on...
> >
>
> I don't. But I do think the current processes can stand improvement.
>
right... i think gnats is one way of doing that. bugzilla is decent, it
just doesn't seems as advanced as gnats which is why i brought it up...
we don't need to beat it to death though, I think tom has fixed more
bugs than me recently so if he is interested in bugzilla i'm all for
giving it a twirl...

Robert Treat
--
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