Re: Add a bugzilla website

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2013, 19:19 UTC
Message-ID: <20131115191957.GA27781@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAH5451=+N1vYoNeweQXe9vavjmRvkEzP=7U+mDf-0zH9OSpZPA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

Andrew Ardill wrote:

> On 15 November 2013 01:51, Konstantin Khomoutov
> <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> But there was an announcement that an experimental JIRA instance has
>> been set up for Git [1].  I'm not sure what its current status is, but
>> you could look at it.
>
> So!
>
> The biggest concern has always been that any bug tracking system needs
> to complement the existing workflow of many developers. For bugs and
> feature requests, they are raised, discussed, and fixed on the list.
> Replacing this process is not in scope for a bug tracker.

I always thought the biggest concern was that someone has to have a sense of what bugs are a priority to track and do the curation to keep the list of bugs useful. In the mailing list it's easy to prioritize based on what people are actually working on; on a bug tracker, which is mainly about what people are *not* working on, that's harder work.

One way to address that problem is to decentralize: maybe everyone has a different idea of what bugs are important, but if each person or project makes their own idea of that public, you get most of the benefit of a bugtracker. Bonus points if different project's bugtrackers link to each other to avoid duplication of information.

In this vein, there are a few active bugtrackers for git already:

 * the mailing list archive is the canonical source of truth
 * the JIRA experiment: https://git-scm.atlassian.net
 * the Debian project maintains http://bugs.debian.org/src:git
 * the Ubuntu project maintains
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/git

I don't think the Ubuntu bugtracker wants reports for upstream issues that were not discovered on Ubuntu. By contrast, the maintainers of the Debian bugtracker have made it clear that they are happy to receive reports for the git package even when they do not affect Debian at all (e.g., Windows-specific issues).

In other words: if you report a bug by sending an email to submit@bugs.debian.org with body text starting with

	Package: git
	Version: 1:1.8.5~rc2-1
	Tags: upstream

	... description of the bug here ...

then I am happy to keep track of it, link to the corresponding upstream conversation, and let you know when I notice it's fixed. Of course I won't fix your bug for you, unless it's a priority to me for other reasons. :)

More details on reporting bugs through the Debian BTS are at [1].

Maybe other people provide the same service as well.

Thanks and hope that helps, Jonathan

[1] http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting