Re: Commit fest queue

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>
>   
>> well what about having the tracker being subscribed to the list and let  
>> it create a bug/patch/ticket id automatically for new mails - that way  
>> all stuff is automatically tracked ? - That way it can be categorized in  
>> the course of the following discussion but no history gets lost.
>>     
>
> This is (more or less) what the Tracman system proposed by Josh Drake
> does -- and it's awful IMHO.  Amusingly, it's also more or less the same
> thing that debbugs does, which IMHO is really good.
>
> The main difference (again IMHO) is that Tracman tries to stuff the info
> in Trac comments, so it has to forcefully extract things from the email
> with rather poor results; whereas debbugs uses the mbox itself as the
> definite storage.
>
> Note that neither are really "subscribed" to the lists; rather they are
> some sort of gatekeepers, which process the email *before* they get to
> the list.  (Actually, AFAIK in debbugs there is no actual mail list --
> it's all mainly about appropriate CC's.)
>
>   

The issue frankly is not tracker features. The issue is who is going to 
maintain it, doing pruning and triage as necessary. No tracker looks 
after itself.

Everybody has their favorite tracker (editor, OS, SCM, ...) ... we can 
have endless fun debating them backwards and forwards and never reach a 
conclusion, just as we do fairly regularly.  The consensus last year 
among a group of us who examined a number of tracker systems was, IIRC, 
that Bugzilla had the best combination of features that people had 
requested. (And it does have some email interaction). Stefan 
Kaltenbrunner did some work on putting up a test instance and played 
with integrating it with the Postgres bug system - I forget how far 
exactly he got.

My understanding BTW is that debbugs is very specifically tailored to 
Debian needs, and is not suitable as a general purpose tracker system. 
And no other OSS project that we could find uses it. So, before we even 
look at it again I at least would want concrete proof that these things 
have changed. (Perhaps Alvaro has forgotten those discussions ;-) )

(And yes, Trac sucks)

cheers

andrew