Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On 05/29/2011 06:04 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 11:23 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> wrote:
>>> My own bare bones wish list for such a tracker is:
>>>
>>> * Runs on Postgres
>>> * Has an email interface
>>>
>>> Make no mistake, whichever we choose, the care of feeding of such a
>>> beast will require some precious resources in time from at least two
>>> people, probably more. If there is anyone in the community that
>>> wants to help the project but hasn't found a way, this is your chance
>>> to step up! :)
>
>> Yeah, agreed. My basic requirements are:
>
>> 1. Given a bug number, find the pgsql-bugs emails that mention it in
>> the subject line. Note that the archives would actually MOSTLY do
>> this ,but for the stupid month-boundary problem which we seem unable
>> to fix despite having some of the finest engineers in the world.
>
> Many, many, many bug issues are not associated with a bug report
> submitted through the web interface. People mail stuff to pgsql-bugs
> manually, or issues turn up in threads on other lists. If a tracker
> can only find things submitted through the web interface, that is not
> going to lead to everyone filing bugs that way; it's going to lead to
> the tracker being ignored as useless.

yeah that's why the original proposal had the plan to provide an email
interface that you could CC or forward a mail to that would turn into a
bug report, that would still require someone to actually do that, but it
is probably not different from moving a discussion on -general that
turns out to be a bug to -hackers (or -bugs).

>
>> 2. Associate some kind of status like "OPEN", "FIXED", "NOTABUG",
>> "WONTFIX", etc. with each such bug via web interface.
>
> Anything that even pretends to be a bug tracker will do that. The
> real question is, who is going to keep it up to date? GSM has the
> right point of view here: we need at least a couple of people who
> are willing to invest substantial amounts of time, or it's not going
> to go anywhere. Seeing that we can barely manage to keep the mailing
> list moderator positions staffed, I'm not hopeful.

I think that a tracker would require a different kind of volunteer that
is much easier to find than ML-moderation, but I guess unless we
actually try we will never know.

Stefan