Re: No Issue Tracker - Say it Ain't So!

On 23 September 2015 at 22:07, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:

> * Josh Berkus (josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com) wrote:
> > On 09/23/2015 11:18 AM, Kam Lasater wrote:
> > > At this point not having one is borderline negligent. I'd suggest:
> > > Github Issues, Pivotal Tracker or Redmine (probably in that order).
> > > There are tens to hundreds of other great ones out there, I'm sure one
> > > of them would also work.
> >
> > First, understand that the Postgres project was created before bug
> > trackers existed. And people are very slow to change their habits,
> > especially since not having a bug tracker was actually a benefit up
> > until around 2005. It's not anymore, but I'm sure people will argue
> > with my statement on that.
> >
> > We have to use something OSS; open source projects depending on
> > closed-source infra is bad news. Out of what's available, I'd actually
> > choose Bugzilla; as much as BZ frustrates the heck out of me at times,
> > it's the only OSS tracker that's at all sophisticated.
> >
> > The alternative would be someone building a sophisticated system on top
> > of RequestTracker, which would also let us have tight mailing list
> > integration given RT's email-driven model. However, that would require
> > someone with the time to build a custom workflow system and web UI on
> > top of RT. It's quite possible that Best Practical would be willing to
> > help here.
>
> Yeah, even if we got past the "do we want a bug tracker?" question, any
> project would probably end up stalling indefinitely on "well then, which
> one?"
>
> In the end, we should probably just throw something up based on whatever
> the folks who are going to be actually maintaining it want and call it a
> 'beta' and see what happens with it. The above-referenced individuals
> would be the bug tracking system curators, of course. Unless it's got
> serious technical issues, the infrastructure team will do our best to
> support the choice. On the other hand, some of us would likely be
> involved in bug curation also.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Stephen
>

Hi,
a couple of days ago I was reading through the tickets in the Django bug
tracker. It was much easier to find any information about the things to
work on than currently for Postgres.

From my point of view, for Postgres, there is just a not updated too often
list of things to implement on the wiki. If I need to find some additional
information, then I can find there just some links to mails from the mail
groups.

Then I need to read through the emails. This is not user friendly too, as I
need to click through the email tree, and if an email has multiple replies,
it is usually hard not to omit some of them, as after going into a reply, I
need to click to get to the parent mail again.

What's more, there are some things on the wiki, and when I asked about
that, it turned out that "oh, there was some discussion long time ago, that
it is not doable".

It would be also worth storing the information that someone is working on
something, so the work won't be doubled.

Personally I'd also change sending patches in emails to github pull
requests :).

... or maybe the difference is more in the data structure, the email
discussion is a tree (with a horrible interface to the archive) while in a
bug tracker, the discussion is linear, and easier to follow.

--
regards Szymon Lipiński