Re: No Issue Tracker - Say it Ain't So!

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> - Bug numbers are sometimes preserved in commit messages, but they
> never make it into release notes. This actually seems like something
> we could improve pretty easily and without a lot of extra work (and
> also without a bug tracker). If every committer makes a practice of
> putting the bug number into the commit message, and the people who
> write the release notes then transcribe the information there, I bet
> that would be pretty useful to a whole lotta people.

The main reason bug numbers don't go into release notes is that only a
fraction of our bugs actually have bug numbers. Very many problem reports
show up via ordinary email traffic. If we had a mail-aware tracker and
there were curators making sure that every problem-reporting thread got
into the tracker, then it might become reasonable to cite bug numbers in
the release notes.

Personally I do make a practice of citing bug numbers in commit messages,
but if you go through my commits, you'll soon agree that the coverage is
too spotty to be useful in release notes. So I have not bothered to
pester other committers to do likewise. Also, I suspect it will not be
uncommon for tracker entries to appear only after the related commits,
particularly for security bugs; so expecting the commit messages to be the
links may be impractical anyway.

Playing devil's advocate ... would this really do much other than bloat
the release notes? The entire assumption of this thread is that people
don't, or don't want to, use the release notes to find out what got fixed;
they'd rather search a tracker.

regards, tom lane