Re: Why Is There No Bug Tracker And Why Are Patches Sent Instead Of Pull Requests

Neal Kreitzinger <nkreitzinger@gmail.com> writes:

The most important information is missing from your discussion: who are you trying to help, and what problem are you trying to solve?

When somebody posts a bug report to the list, with the current workflow, one of these things happens:

 1. It is an already solved issue. People who are familiar with the
    existing fix may immediately answer, after running "git log", with "It
    is fixed in v1.7.6". Or somebody not so familiar with the fix may
    start "Does not reproduce for me who use the 'master' version. Git
    from what era are you using?" conversation. I do not think a bug
    tracker will help much in this case [*1*].

 2. It is an already answered non-issue. People who are familiar with the
    previous discussion may point at the list archive, or somebody may dig
    up the answer in the gmane archive. I do not know if a bug tracker
    will help much in this case. Having a place to point people at is
    better than having to write everything from scratch every time, but
    (1) looking for the previous discussion is the more time consuming
    part, and (2) once the previous discussion is found in the list
    archive, we already have the necessary pointer.

 3. People who are familiar with the area of the problem may start "Need
    more info" conversation. This may result in either finding the report
    a non-issue (#1 or #2), or it may turn out to be a real issue, and
    after further analysis, design and coding, may result in a fix.  Once
    this flow starts rolling, the current workflow works very well.

 4. It falls through cracks, because nobody even categorizes it into the
    above three.

I think the primary thing people want out of a bug tracker is to reduce the frequency of #4. The real solution for it is to free up time from people who can do the later part of #3 so that they can spend more time to turn #4 into #3.

A way to do so is for members of the community who are capable of doing #1 and #2 but not familiar enough with the code to do the later part of #3 to help with earlier part of #3 (i.e. triaging).

As I already said. the mailing-list based workflow serves us reasonably well once the ball is rolling in #3, and that was the reason why I suggested some heuristics to catch #4 in my previous message. There are cases where the original reporter disappears during the "need more info" exchange, and in such a case a tracking system _may_ be able to help us remember that the issue is unresolved because of reporter inaction, but the tracker won't respond to "need more info" itself, and people tend to ignore automated nag mails, so there is still a need for warm body human bug secretary who interfaces with the reporter in such a case.

In any case, any solution that demands more things to be done by people near the core developers than they currently are already doing will make things worse by exacerbating the problem that comes from a bottleneck in the process. I do not think your "The maintainer triages and assigns issues to other developers" or "The assigned developer marks the issue as 'done' after fixing it" will fly very well, regardless of the use of any bug tracker.

[Footnote]

 *1* If the symptom is so straightforward that a simple search in a bug
     tracker can produce hits for an already solved issue, grepping in
     Release Notes should equally work well.

 *2* I do not know if this happens too often to be a real problem, though.