Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On mån, 2011-05-30 at 22:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On 2011-05-30 4:31 PM, "Peter Eisentraut" <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> >> Based on that, and past discussions, and things we've tried in the past,
> >> and gut feeling, and so on, it looks like Request Tracker would appear
> >> to be the next best thing to consider trying out. What do people think
> >> about that?
>
> > I'd be more optimistic that debbugs, or an adaption thereof, might more
> > nearly fit into the workflow.
>
> Yeah, that's my impression as well.

I'm very familiar with debbugs, so if we'd use that, I would hit the
ground running.

But a few things to consider:

* You would probably need a lot of manpower to customize and
maintain this thing. And you'd be dealing with lots of
unfamiliar technology.
* Only very few people in Debian know the internals of this thing,
so don't expect much timely help.
* The actual workflow in Debian doesn't only consist of debbugs,
but a bunch of ad hoc add-ons, additional web interfaces, and
scripts. You'd have to adapt or port or replace some of these
as well.
* It's not a system set up for easy searching and aggregating, the
sort of thing an SQL-savvy crowd might expect. One of the
better ways nowadays to search for bugs in Debian is actually
the UDD, which is a dump of the bug database imported into a
PostgreSQL instance. See previous point.
* Actually, a number of teams in Debian use Request Tracker as
well (see http://wiki.debian.org/rt.debian.org) I don't know
why, just saying.