Re: Bug tracker tool we need

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 08:44:13PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> I wonder if maybe the nearest step towards "better bug tracker" is a more
> readily referenceable mail archive.
>
> Clearly, one of our "frictions" is searching for relevant messages, so improved
> mail archive == lowered friction, no?
>
> There's a very particular use case; people keep rueing that indexes get cut off
> on a monthly basis. That's doubtless not the only pain, but it keeps getting
> mentioned, so solving it seems valuable.

Agreed. I think Magnus is working on having the threads span months.
The big question is what are we going to do with this ability once we
get it.

> Having a correlation between commits, commitfest entries, and associated email
> seems like another valuable addition.

Yep.

> Perhaps there are more... I'm not yet poking at anything that would suggest
> "email database", either.
>
> A lot of the analysis would be more network-oriented; putting more of a Prolog
> hat on, not so much tabular / relational ...

To put a finer point on this, I think projects that interact with users
via a bug tracker have much poorer user/developer communication, and
also less impetus to fix bugs quickly, because it is already recorded in
the tracker. And after not dealing with bugs immediately for a while,
the bug database becomes huge, and developers can only triage the
database, fixing commonly-reported bugs, and leaving the rest for later,
which effectively means never.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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