Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 4:05 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>> That doesn't mean that better integration cannot be worked on later, but
>> this illusion that a bug tracker must have magical total awareness of
>> the entire flow of information in the project from day one is an
>> illusion and has blocked this business for too long IMO.
>
> If it has only a partial view of the set of bugs being worked on, it's
> not going to meet the goals that are being claimed for it.
>
> I don't doubt that somebody could run around and link every discussion
> about a bug into the tracker.  I'm just dubious that that actually
> *will* happen with enough reliability to make the tracker more useful
> than a mailing-list search.
>
> In the end, I think that requests for a tracker mostly come from people
> who are not part of this community, or at least not part of its mailing
> lists (which is about the same thing IMO).  If they submitted a bug
> report via the lists, they're generally going to get replies via email,
> and that seems sufficient to me.  But if they submitted a report via the
> web form, they might well be expecting that they can track what's going
> on with it on a web page.  And that's not unreasonable.  But we could
> fix that without any changes at all in our work processes.  Just have
> the webform add a "cc: bugbot-bugNNNN(at)postgresql(dot)org" to each submitted
> email, and set up a bot to collect the traffic and display it on a
> suitable web page.  (Spam filtering left as an exercise for the reader.)

The part of the discussion we've missed so far is that bug trackers
are usually about the blame functionality and measurement of response
times.

We're a responsive and diligent community, so I see no problem here
that wouldn't be solved simply by using better static URLs.

--
 Simon Riggs                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services