Re: Bug tracker tool we need

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 05:44, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> Rather than talk about adopting one of the available torture devices,
>> I'd happily consider the simplest thing possible that would be useful
>> here instead.  Here's my proposed tiny tracker:
>
> Wasn't Jay just muttering about "writing your own bug tracker" being an
> anti-pattern?  But still, there's something in what you say, because ...

The caes where it would work to do that is if we agreed it'd be a
"tiny tracker". And not actually try to do too much. As in basicaly a
neater frontend over the mailinglist archives.

I actually started on a demo of that at one point. Currently blocked
behind the fact that we have to fix the mailinglist archives as well,
in particular the break-on-month-boundary kills any attempt to do such
a thing. Which is also being worked on, but backlogged as usual :S

I'll admit that one reason it's been sitting fairly low on the prio
list is the guaranteed months of bikeshedding that it would bring
along ;)

>> -Make commits that fix a bug reference it in one of the standard ways
>> that's done by every one of these bug trackers.  Just throw "Fixes
>> #6596" into the commit message.  These will probably work if a more
>> serious tool is adopted, too.
>
> ... I think you'll find a lot of that data could be mined out of our
> historical commit logs already.  I know I make a practice of mentioning
> "bug #NNNN" whenever there is a relevant bug number, and I think other
> committers do too.  It wouldn't be 100% coverage, but still, if we could
> bootstrap the tracker with a few hundred old bugs, we might have
> something that was immediately useful, instead of starting from scratch
> and hoping it would eventually contain enough data to be useful.

I have always considered that a *requirement*, not a neat addon.

> At the same time, I think we'd likely be a lot better off squirting this
> data into bugzilla or another standard tracker, instead of building our
> own infrastructure.

I'm somewhat doubtful.

As a first step, we should at least stick in a tracker with a
reasonable SQL schema so it's possible to extract and do smomething
with the data. IIRC, bugzilla (and others) at least used to just
concatenate all comments into a single text field, and not even keep
them apart, for example. Because clearly this whole JOIN thing is evil
and difficult. They may have fixed that by now, but what i've seen
from most trackers shows signs of people who have never seen a
database beyond an Excel sheet...

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/