Re: Learning curves and such (was Re: pgFoundry)

> discuss it, and contribute to resolving it. More often than not, a 
> web-based interface like Bugzilla leads to a single "bug master", who 
> does most of this work by themselves. Besides the fact we don't have 
> such a person, it would also mean that knowledge of bugs/patches and the 
> discussion about resolving issues is distributed among a smaller pool of 
> people.

I can only speak for RT but with RT you can easily avoid this. For 
example you can set it up so that anything that would go to 
patches@postgresql.org would automatically create a ticket an alert all 
people within the patches group.

Multiple people can be assigned to a ticket as a maintainer or just a 
watcher.

You can even respond to specific messages within the thread instead of 
just a top down (one email after the other).


> There is definitely room for improvement; submitted patches do 
> occasionally fall through the cracks, for example. I would personally be 
> interested in a "bug-tracking system" that is closer to a shared email 
> archive.

That would be another nice part of RT. RT automatically deals with 
attachments and although I wouldn't use it for this you could even use 
it as a semi patch repository until the patch is actually approved for 
submission.

> issues, searching through issues, etc. But the point is that the current 
> system works well;

Well does it though? I am not saying it is bad, well yes I am ;). There 
is no central place for me to point one of my developers and say -- Hey,
look at this patch... weren't we working on something like this? Let's 
help them out.

I have to have the dig through the mail archives which is fairly counter 
productive. It would be much better to be able to say, hey... look at 
patch #42345. What do you think?

> I'm not sure which existing systems fit this model (suggestions are 
> welcome) -- email needs to be the primary interface, not an afterthought 
> (as is often the case). Perhaps RT would work, I'm not sure.

RT supports complete email integration. Most of the interaction I do 
with it is actually through email not through the web interface. It also 
has the ability to have a knowledge base dropped right on top of it.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake



> 
> -Neil
> 
> [1] Hat-tip to Andrew Morton's keynote at LCA, which made this point 
> effectively.
> 
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