Re: Link to bug webpage

On Tuesday 21 August 2001 11:59, Vince Vielhaber wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Red Hat makes mission-critical use of bugzilla running on Oracle. See
> > bugzilla.redhat.com. And ask the Red Hat people on these lists their
> > opinions of bugzilla.

> What who thinks of what has actually become irrelevant.

Not really. I like to see what works for other projects before passing
judgment -- and bugzilla and bug trackers of like bent are working very well
for other projects. Red Hat is just one of the largest such 'projects.'

>The following
> is clear:

> o No tool will replace the mailing lists
> o The mailing lists are where discussion will be held
> o Many/most maintainers have no desire to update bug reports

Ok, having been involved in a project that has both an active mailing list
AND a bug tracker, I can comment on this.

I am not interested in finding a mailing list _replacement_. I am, however,
interested in finding a augmentative solution that does well what mailing
lists do not do well.

Mailing lists do many things well, but they do not do the business of
bugtracking well. Particularly as the size and scope of the project goes up.

Bug trackers do not do the thing of discussion well. They do, however, do
the thing of bug status reporting _very_ well. They also do the thing of
relating bugs to OS versions, releases, and libraries much easier than with a
list. Reference the '7.1.2-3' patch bug sent last week. Much was said that
was not at all related to the real problem -- Windows 98.

While the new fts mailing list search is VERY nice, mailing list bug reports
and the discussion that follows may or may not help someone down the road.
IOW, just how useful are our [BUGS] archives from two years ago? Just how
useful are any of our archives, for that matter? I have found them useful on
occassion -- but those occassions are rather rare and usually are just to
remember what _I_ said about something. Or to see what Tom Lane's first post
was. Or to see how long somebody has been with the project. Etc. I don't
want to see the searchable archives go away, of course -- but I am
questioning how useful they are to _non-developers_.

A dynamic tracker would show bugs that were fixed at various versions. It
would also make the project seem more responsive to those not on the lists
--the vast majority of our users likely don't even know these lists are as
useful as they are. I had used PostgreSQL for two years before I found out
that the mailling lists are where _it's_ happening. I was _amazed_ at these
lists and their contents. And I ran a Usenet site ten years ago, at that.
Maybe that was the source of my amazement, OTOH. I've been through
news.groups wars, news.admin wars, etc. There weren't any real 'wars' here
--and that was _different_.

JMHO, of course.
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11