Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> That doesn't mean that better integration cannot be worked on later, but
> this illusion that a bug tracker must have magical total awareness of
> the entire flow of information in the project from day one is an
> illusion and has blocked this business for too long IMO.

If it has only a partial view of the set of bugs being worked on, it's
not going to meet the goals that are being claimed for it.

I don't doubt that somebody could run around and link every discussion
about a bug into the tracker. I'm just dubious that that actually
*will* happen with enough reliability to make the tracker more useful
than a mailing-list search.

In the end, I think that requests for a tracker mostly come from people
who are not part of this community, or at least not part of its mailing
lists (which is about the same thing IMO). If they submitted a bug
report via the lists, they're generally going to get replies via email,
and that seems sufficient to me. But if they submitted a report via the
web form, they might well be expecting that they can track what's going
on with it on a web page. And that's not unreasonable. But we could
fix that without any changes at all in our work processes. Just have
the webform add a "cc: bugbot-bugNNNN(at)postgresql(dot)org" to each submitted
email, and set up a bot to collect the traffic and display it on a
suitable web page. (Spam filtering left as an exercise for the reader.)

regards, tom lane