Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:26 AM, Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Joe Abbate <jma(at)freedomcircle(dot)com> wrote:
>>  Anyone interested in the tracker, please visit
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/TrackerDiscussion and add your
>> feedback/input.
>
> I think this illustrates exactly what we *don't* want to happen with a
> bug tracker. We want the discussion to stay *here* not on some other
> medium accessible only through the web and editable only through a web
> interface....

That's more or less why I was suggesting SD as a possible model, as a
bug tracker that begins with a command line interface consciously
analogous to version management software. (See attachment for samples
of the help...)

> Also your summary seems to have missed the point on the "has email
> interface" requirement. The table of features you listed has just
> "Creation of bugs via mail interface" as the only feature that is
> accessible from email.

I recall RT (on one of the lists) having a somewhat sophisticated
email-based interface, however, I'm not at all sure that this would be
considered a good thing, as it would be pretty "in your face" that you
are submitting specially-constructed email messages to control things.

> I'm not sure what Robert meant but I suspect he meant what I would
> want which is the ability to add comments, close bugs, set other
> properties, etc. By email. My biggest gripe about bugzilla was that it
> sent you an email with updates to the bug but you couldn't respond to
> that email.

Having used a number of versions of Bugzilla over the years, I'm
somewhat comfortable with its foibles, but that's not nearly the same
thing as actually liking it.

> My ideal bug tracker is the debian one which basically stays out of
> your way and lets you cc any message to a specific bug at
> nnnn(at)bugs(dot)debian(dot)org which archives that message in the bug and sends
> it to anyone listening to the bug. And you can have control commands
> to close it or edit it -- basically making all our existing "that's
> not a bug bleah bleah" messages into "close nnn; that's not a bug
> bleah bleah" messages.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/debbugs/

I suppose it would be interesting to inject a little more code into
this that would collect other interesting bits of data, such as the
commit hash of a patch that is believed to fix the bug, and version
numbers believed to include fixes for the bug. Also interesting would
be a reference to commitfest work relating to the bug.

Perhaps it's enough to just send an email "to the bug" indicating
appropriate URLs, as opposed to requiring any first-class extensions
to support this sort of data.

I think we'd probably want a web interface that can point not merely
to messages, but also to the whole threads of discussion. That way,
reporting that an email thread relates to bug 72521 requires only that
*ONE* of the messages in the thread includes "cc:
72521(at)bugs(dot)postgresql(dot)org" (or similar).
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"