bug tracking

[Carl Worth]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:58:13 -0400, Jameson Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
> Issues are raised on the mailing list, because there's no where else to
> raise them (other than irc, where they're not actually logged).  But
> there's currently no way to track issues.  We can't tell if they've been
> dealt with, and we have no way of browsing through them.  Folks who send
> issues to the list have no feedback that their issue has even been
> acknowledged.

Right. I agree with all of these points.

I wasn't trying to claim that what we are currently doing is sufficient.

What I was trying to say is that our new "bug tracking system"
(which I agree that we do need) would ideally involve as little change
to my workflow as possible.

Here's a rough sketch along the lines of something that I would like:

  1. Particular messages could be tagged as indicating a bug.

     I can do this for my own private use now, but we need better
     visibility of that. Such as publication of "unresolved bugs" to a
     web page.

  2. Users could indicate that an email they are sending indicates a
     bug.

     Perhaps an extra header would cause the mail to automatically
     acquire a tag when I incorporated it.

  3. I could tag bug messages as "resolved" or "invalid" or whatever.

     Again, as in (1) for this to be useful we need a new way for users
     to get visibility to these tag manipulations. And I'd also like to
     have some associations between git commits and bug resolution.

It looks to me like the ability to share tags, (and then the ability to
turn a notmuch search into a web page) would go a long way toward giving
us a "bug tracker". Since we already want both of those features
*anyway* I think we should definitely pursue this.

In the meantime, if people want to explore existing bug trackers, I
would be fine with adopting something sane.

> Saying that issues sent to the list are usually followed by a "thanks,
> pushed" implies that only issues that include patches are acknowledged.
> While I certainly appreciate that this is a Free software project and
> that users should be encouraged to contribute, I don't think it's wise
> to imply that "only issues with patches will be acknowledged".  I think
> that all users should be encouraged to report issues, even those that
> are not capable or currently able to supply patches.

You're absolutely right. I wasn't trying to imply that. I just meant
that I'm already following up via email on any reported issue. This
could be "I've committed a fix for this bug" just as much as "I've
committed your patch".

> > My primary metric for adopting a new issue tracker is "how little extra
> > work will I have to do to use this compared to what I'm already
> > doing?". That's a lot more important to me than how the system stores
> > its data.
> 
> I don't think I agree that that's the right question to ask.  We're
> currently not tracking issues at, particularly ones not accompanied by
> patches, so I claim that we have to do something different.  Doing
> nothing at all leaves us with a continued problem.

But I *am* tracking things. The only real problems are:

  1. People don't have visibility into my tracking efforts

  2. We can't collaborate on the tracking efforts.

So I think the various tag-sharing prototypes being worked on right now
are extremely interesting.

-Carl
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