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

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 1, 2012, 11:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CACBZZX4T28m6k7A53Zc32Aquk-jh7_R0KPeq983bSQ3B-r27cA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <8762eoimp0.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch>

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 12:29, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> Andrew Ardill <andrew.ardill@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I have set up a JIRA instance using Atlassian's OnDemand service,
>> available at https://git-scm.atlassian.net/
> [...]
>> As I see it (and Junio has mentioned before) we are going to need
>> people who are able to manage the issues in this system
>
> Note that you are not the first one to try.  The most elaborate plan and
> writeup that I know of sits at
>
>  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/136500  [1]
>
> Jan "jast" Krüger also mentioned server issues today, so *.jk.gs is
> presumably down because of that, not because gitbugs.jk.gs is no longer
> valid.
>
> Nevertheless, AFAIK it has never been used for "real work", so you may
> want to look into why that happened, and do something different.

As someone who submits patches every once in a while I can echo other sentiments in this thread, just because you have a list of issues that doesn't mean anyone is working on them.

However I'd also sometimes like to work on some random issue because I'm bored, and having a collection of issues ordered by priority (or popularity) would be useful when that happens.

But I think any proposal to set up a wholly external system is going to fail, we do most of our bug submission / commenting etc. on this mailing list, and that isn't going to change, so there's always going to be a large chasm between the list and any external system.

What I think *would* work however is a system that feeds off the mailing list. This could be as simple as a mailing list aggregator that allowed you to star certain messages, and the most starred messages would be the popular issues.

A more fancy solution would:

 * Consume every single message that gets sent to the list
 * Group each thread and allow it to be categorized as a
   bug/issue/enhancement/complaint
 * Allow you to mark a collection of threads as describing the same
   issue, so you'd have duplicates marked & the full history of a
   discussion on some issue.
 * Allow you to mark an issue as outstanding / resolved / allow voting
   on it.

Thus you'd automatically build up an issue database without anyone going out of their way, all it would need is the same people who complain that they can't file bugs either categorizing existing posts, or categorizing a post they just made.

Many bug trackers can be made to work with E-Mail (e.g. Jira, RT etc.), although I don't know if they're well set up to follow a mailing list like this. I think e.g. Jira assumes that you have a the bug id in the subject, and might not be smart enough to group things by In-Reply-To headers.