Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

Hi Tom,

On 05/29/2011 11:05 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> 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).

I think that's a bit harsh. I assume you consider GSM a part of the
community and he's asking for a tracker, even going to the trouble of
posting a "Help Wanted!" article about it.

> 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.)

I think there's more to a tracker than having bug submitters find all
the emails related to it. For example, one can use it to aggregate
interesting data, like how many bugs reported per person/email address,
or PostgreSQL version or OS (or may be I'm not aware and something like
this is already going on behind the submission form).

Anyway, I may be willing to do some work on a tracker--if there's
interest-- since at least part of the work could fit in with the
database interface area of the Pyrseas project.

To collect info/discuss, I could use
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/TrackerDiscussion but I see there's a
request to not modify/add anything without talking to Stefan
Kaltenbrunner. Would a new page be preferable?

All the best,

Joe