Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On tis, 2011-05-31 at 10:36 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I get the feeling we're approaching this backwards. Wouldn't the
> normal way to do it be to define the workflow we *want*, and then
> figure out which bugtracker works for that or requires the least
> changes for that, rather than to try to figure out which bugtracker we
> want and then see how much we have to change our workflow to match?

Maybe you are assuming that there is a single workflow that everyone
wants. So far we know that most people want to work by email and want
to know that a bug is closed. Is there more detail than that that we
can extract?

> So in order to start a brand new bikeshed to paint on, have we even
> considered a very trivial workflow like letting the bugtracker
> actually *only* track our existing lists and archives. That would
> mean:
>
> * Mailing lists are *primary*, and the mailing list archives are
> *primary* (yes, this probably requires a fix to the archives, but that
> really is a different issue)
> * New bugs are added by simply saying "this messageid represents a
> thread that has this bug in it", and all the actual contents are
> pulled from the archives
> * On top of this, the bug just tracks metadata - such as open/closed
> more or less. It does *not* track the actual contents at all.
> * Bugs registered through the bugs form would of course automatically
> add such a messageid into the tracker.

Well, that is not a workflow either, it's approaching the issue by
proposing an implementation. Nothing says that an existing or new
system doesn't work exactly like that. I would be concerned about the
search capabilities of such a system, however.