Re: Add a bugzilla website

[Andrew Ardill <andrew.ardill@gmail.com>]

On 15 November 2013 01:51, Konstantin Khomoutov
<flatworm@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> But there was an announcement that an experimental JIRA instance has
> been set up for Git [1].  I'm not sure what its current status is, but
> you could look at it.

So!

The biggest concern has always been that any bug tracking system needs
to complement the existing workflow of many developers. For bugs and
feature requests, they are raised, discussed, and fixed on the list.
Replacing this process is not in scope for a bug tracker.

In that framework the main value a bug tracker has is keeping track of
what bugs exist, what versions they affect, and when they are fixed.
Unfortunately, at the moment, collecting and curating this information
is entirely manual.

The JIRA attempt [1] looks to pull in every conversation and thread it
for us (adding replies as comments to existing tickets), but hasn't
tried to anything beyond that. Automation may be possible, to do
things like parse What's Cooking and the release notes, but that is a
harder problem :)

The tools are there, and you should be able to log in and add/update
issues. Feel free! (Definite value would be derived from a dedicated
curator who updated the bug tracker manually)

I had a look over the set up (I hadn't in a while) and realised we
were dropping some emails, so I'll try and fix that, but the bigger
problem is that simply creating tickets to track conversations is not
enough.

We need to then identify those conversations that we care about and
capture some metadata about them - did they resolve the reported
issue, and when did that happen? Junio is the source of truth for
this, and so ideally we would use his communications to understand it,
but that just shifts the problem to linking the issues he writes about
to the conversations that started them.

In any case, adding value to the existing process is hard (because it
works quite well!) and probably requires significantly more work to
even understand what that value might look like. This, I think, is the
key reason it is hard to truly get started with any bug tracking
solution; the solution is not obvious, and the current (very
customised) workflow is not supported directly by any tool.

Regards,

Andrew Ardill

[1] https://git-scm.atlassian.net