Re: Commit fest queue

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>>
>>
>>> well what about having the tracker being subscribed to the list and
>>> let it create a bug/patch/ticket id automatically for new mails -
>>> that way all stuff is automatically tracked ? - That way it can be
>>> categorized in the course of the following discussion but no history
>>> gets lost.
>>>
>>
>> This is (more or less) what the Tracman system proposed by Josh Drake
>> does -- and it's awful IMHO. Amusingly, it's also more or less the same
>> thing that debbugs does, which IMHO is really good.
>>
>> The main difference (again IMHO) is that Tracman tries to stuff the info
>> in Trac comments, so it has to forcefully extract things from the email
>> with rather poor results; whereas debbugs uses the mbox itself as the
>> definite storage.
>>
>> Note that neither are really "subscribed" to the lists; rather they are
>> some sort of gatekeepers, which process the email *before* they get to
>> the list. (Actually, AFAIK in debbugs there is no actual mail list --
>> it's all mainly about appropriate CC's.)
>>
>>
>
> The issue frankly is not tracker features. The issue is who is going to
> maintain it, doing pruning and triage as necessary. No tracker looks
> after itself.

heh very true ...

>
> Everybody has their favorite tracker (editor, OS, SCM, ...) ... we can
> have endless fun debating them backwards and forwards and never reach a
> conclusion, just as we do fairly regularly. The consensus last year
> among a group of us who examined a number of tracker systems was, IIRC,
> that Bugzilla had the best combination of features that people had
> requested. (And it does have some email interaction). Stefan
> Kaltenbrunner did some work on putting up a test instance and played
> with integrating it with the Postgres bug system - I forget how far
> exactly he got.

the setup is more or less complete and the integration part was with the
community login system (same we have now for wiki.postgresql.org) by
adding a postgresql authentication backend as well as some experimental
modifications to the email_in.pl script to enable autocreation of bugs
from email.
I did't push it further (or put it to a silent trial on say -bugs which
is way less complex than -patches but might give us some ideas on the
usability anyway) because I was fairly busy at the time and could not
probably support it on a larger scale and it is far from clear that we
actually want something like that.

>
> My understanding BTW is that debbugs is very specifically tailored to
> Debian needs, and is not suitable as a general purpose tracker system.
> And no other OSS project that we could find uses it. So, before we even
> look at it again I at least would want concrete proof that these things
> have changed. (Perhaps Alvaro has forgotten those discussions ;-) )

yeah that is my impression as well.

>
> (And yes, Trac sucks)

+1

Stefan