Re: GNOME Bugtracking System

[Erik Andersen <andersen inconnect com>]

Quoting Miguel de Icaza <miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx>:
> 
> > It really is nice -- and is free. You can take a look and see it in
> > action at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/ and you can download it from
> > http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/debbugs/ and install it and try
> > it out.
> > 
> > It even lets you classify bugs by severity. Currently you can set
> > any bug to be either critical, grave, important, normal, wishlist,
> > or fixed. This lets people write scripts that automagically post to
> > debian-devel-announce with a list of all bugs that must be resolved
> > before a release.
> 
> So, how can we start using this system?  Could the current debian
> system be customzied for us to use?
> 
> Miguel.

Sure. It is GPL and the source is only 57k gzipped. To configure it you
just adjust some .m4 scripts (something the gnome folks now have down
to a science ;-). There is a config directory that contains a template
set of .m4 scripts, and another directory that contains these scripts
as adjusted for debian. You could probably just cp the config/debian
directory to config/gnome and s/debian/gnome/g and have it nearly ready
to go (modulo having a machine named something like bugs.gnome.org
running exim and apache).

Anyway, Ian Jackson wrote it and I'm sure he'd be willing to help out
answering a few questions if needed (I havn't asked him but he's a nice
guy and generally willing to help as time permits).

Did I mention it gracefully handles being mirrored? Well it does with
actvive mirrors in .de, .uk, .nl and the US.


Anyway, from the README in the source:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
 - GNU m4
 - GNU date
 - GNU gzip
 - Perl 5 (5.004 is known to work)
 - Lynx 2.7 or later
 - atob/btoa
 - The bug system requires its own mail domain.  It comes with code
   which understands how exim and qmail deliver mail for such a domain to a
   script.
 - If the local MTA is qmail you _must_ install a different MTA
   somewhere (eg in a subdirectory) and tell the bug system to use that;
   qmail has broken command-line parsing in its /usr/lib/sendmail
   emulation.
 - A webserver (this is easiest if the bug system can write
   directly to the webspace).
 - Somewhere to run CGI scripts (unless you don't need the `go to
   bug' and `go to package' forms to work).


Download it, try it.  If you need help, I'll be happy to help you make
it go.

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen   Web:    http://www.inconnect.com/~andersen/ 
                   email:  andersee@debian.org
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