Tom Lane wrote:
>Peter remarked that he wouldn't use a bug database unless it has some
>input filtering to remove all the non-bug issues that currently clutter
>the pgsql-bug archives. I tend to agree with him. A possible way to
>handle that is to set up bug-input like a closed mailing list: only
>accept mail from designated people (developers and people nominated to
>help run the bug database). So, a bug database entry would start life
>when some one of these people replies to an emailed bug report
>confirming that there is a bug, or forwards the verified report to
>bug-input, or whatever.
>
Here I respectfully disagree. If I have to wait on 'approval' to submit
a bug or carry on a discussion about it, most of the time I'm going to
silently drop it and find some other way to make my project work.
I like Mozilla's bugzilla because I can instantly and with very little
effort classify all sorts of things and describe my bug. Then along
comes a person who can assign it to someone, confirm it, mark it up as
clueless user, or whatever is needed. Everyone associated with this bug
# gets a copy of every transaction that happens to this bug. You can
easily cc this into the pgsql-bugs.
A lot of projects grow and develop little things like 'it works for all
of us so it's not a bug', I run into that now and then in an obscure
issue...libtool comes to mind...and -nobody- has information on it
except 4 other webpages in this universe where 1 person reports the
problem, two people say the 1st person is shouldn't be using gcc 2.96
and the fourth person has a fix which meant gcc wasn't at fault in the
first place.
You can't have a really effective 100% bug database without allowing
everyone to add to it. If I had to submit to mozilla "tables are one
pixel off starting about Aug 21st" and get approval before it went in,
I'd likely say screw it and simply make my tables one pixel bigger. As
it is, I post the bug and 20 minutes later due to the magic of bugzilla,
the right person put the fix in. I don't have to adapt my tables.
:)
-d