Re: Does the bug tracker actually work?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"John R. Sheets" <dusk@ravendusk.org> writes:

> On Thursday, August 03, 2000, Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Paul Warren <pdw@ex-parrot.com> writes:
> > > So, does bugs.gnome.org actually work, or am I failing some initiation
> > > ritual that makes submitting patches extra difficult.
> > 
> > The tracker is kind of fucked. It works "sometimes".
> > 
> > We need a volunteer to write a script to shovel all the debbugs into
> > bugzilla. :-) Anyone?
> 
> Hmmm.  We (CodeWeavers) are looking into putting together a bug tracking
> system for the Wine project, and are strongly considering debbugs.  Is
> the suckage specific to bugs.gnome.org, or to the debbugs system in
> general?  I seem to remember hearing about problems with email header
> fields.  Is that the main problem, or are there others?
> 
> I'd hate to invoke a plague of locusts upon the Wine community.  (c:

The main problem is just that the implementation is really
pretty bad, and it isn't backended by a database. It gets really
inefficient for sufficiently large number of bugs, and it is not
code you'd want to try and fix.

>From the user point of view, it is also significantly less powerful
than something like bugzilla. Queries are less powerful, and bugzilla
also tends to make it much easier to keep on updating a single bug
report. Not to say that bugzilla doesnt' have some oddities. Debbugs
does have a somewhat nicer mail interface, thought not enough nicer to
keep people who really want to do things just by mail completely
happy.

Part of the problem may be that bugs.gnome.org is using an older
version of debuggs, but I'm not sure the newer versions are 
enough better to be worth the pain of upgrading as opposed to
switching to something better.

Regards,
                                        Owen