Re: Getting a bug tracker for the Postgres project

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 04:26, Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Joe Abbate <jma(at)freedomcircle(dot)com> wrote:
>>  Anyone interested in the tracker, please visit
>> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/TrackerDiscussion and add your
>> feedback/input.
>
> I think this illustrates exactly what we *don't* want to happen with a
> bug tracker. We want the discussion to stay *here* not on some other
> medium accessible only through the web and editable only through a web
> interface....

+<as high number as my quota currently goes>

It's fine that a bug tracker *tracks* bugs. It should not control
them. That's not how this community currently works, and a lot of
people have said that's how they want it to stay (at least for now).

> Also your summary seems to have missed the point on the "has email
> interface" requirement. The table of features you listed has just
> "Creation of bugs via mail interface" as the only feature that is
> accessible from email.
>
> I'm not sure what Robert meant but I suspect he meant what I would
> want which is the ability to add comments, close bugs, set other
> properties, etc. By email. My biggest gripe about bugzilla was that it
> sent you an email with updates to the bug but you couldn't respond to
> that email.

I agree with these too :-)

It's also missing what I believe is a very important requirement - it
needs to have an extensive, and fully supported, API. So that we can
easily make it work together with our other services.

> My ideal bug tracker is the debian one which basically stays out of
> your way and lets you cc any message to a specific bug at
> nnnn(at)bugs(dot)debian(dot)org which archives that message in the bug and sends
> it to anyone listening to the bug. And you can have control commands
> to close it or edit it -- basically making all our existing "that's
> not a bug bleah bleah" messages into "close nnn; that's not a bug
> bleah bleah" messages.

No direct experience with the debian tracker, but I agree that being
able to do all those things from mail is very important. If it *also*
provides a way to do this from the web, that's even better.

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/