Re: bugs that have not been replied-to on list

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:43 AM, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> BUG #5287: ispell dict erroneously returns lexeme on all prefix+suffix
>> cross products
>> BUG #5300: Bug on Mac OS X 10.6 and Postgres 8.4
>> BUG #5316: not handled error in inherit queries
>> BUG #5335: GUC value lost on exception
>> BUG #4785: Installation fails
>
> I responded to that one:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-05/msg00002.php

!!!!! I never got that email message. Something is wrong with this
mailing list. In the case of the email that started this discussion,
you never saw the original email message, and in this case, I never
saw your reply. That's bad.

>> BUG #5337: PostgreSQL install fails with 1603 error
>
> That's a PG 8.2/MSI issue, which is why none of the EDB guys
> responded. My own excuse is that I'm not the only guy that worked on
> the MSI installer, and I simply don't have time to respond to every
> problem reported.
>
>> BUG #4806: Bug with GiST index and empty integer array?
>> BUG #4769: xmlconcat produces invalid xml values -> data corruption
>> BUG #5379: Adding hunspell-ko dictionary for full-text search doesn't work
>> BUG #5405: Consol and utf8
>
> This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
> now see what you made me do :-(

You know, I never really thought we did before, but I had the same
thought last night. One of the problems with "don't worry about what
product it is, just post here" is that it only works if people from
all of those products regularly monitor this list, which in turn
requires them to skip over the issues with all the other products that
they don't know or care about. An actual bug-tracking system would
let us classify bugs by product, which would in theory help with this
problem. Even consider ecpg. It's part of core PostgreSQL, so
undeniably on topic for this list, but it's asking a lot for Michael
Meskes to read everything that goes by on this list just to catch the
2 or 3 ecpg problems that get reported each year.

Of course, if the people working on those projects don't monitor the
bug-tracking system, then we'll have the same problem with
non-response that we do today - maybe worse, since at least now we can
refer people who don't get an answer to another forum. Another problem
is that any solution we picked would have to be acceptable to the
people who do actively monitor this list. It would be bad if changing
to a different system resulted in bugs getting less attention. But
practically speaking, I'd guess there's less than 20 people who
respond to most of the traffic on -bugs, so if we find a solution that
those people like, we'd be better off.

We'd also have fewer problems with things slipping through the cracks.
Things might still get ignored, but at least the system would be
keeping track of that instead of Bruce and I. Momjzilla/Haaszilla has
a catchy ring to it but it's not a very efficient way to run a
project.

...Robert