Re: Does the bug tracker actually work?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Martin Baulig <martin@home-of-linux.org> writes: 
> So here's the person who does.
> 
> If it's just the machine is dying why don't we just move it to a different
> one ?
> 
> Maybe it's just our very broken installation which sucks, not the bug
> tracker itself.  The Debian people seem to be happy with "their" bug tracker,
> so we should try to find out whether it works for them and not for us.
> 

I have used both fairly extensively and yes debbugs is not as nice. It
doesn't have very sophisticated queries, it doesn't let you assign
bugs to persons, you can't get on the "CC" list for a bug, there are
no priorities (only severities), there's only an email interface which
I find less convenient than the web interface (granted the reverse is
true if you have a slow net connection). Bugzilla is actively
maintained, debbugs no one is fixing. Bugzilla lets us separate
different releases (GNOME 1.0, GNOME 1.2, etc.). Bugzilla lets us
present a constrained list of packages and versions instead of letting
users make up package names. Bugzilla has two nice formats for query
results (one with just bug title, priority, etc. and one with the full
bug description). Bugzilla can assign bugs to individuals and mail
them about changes. Bugzilla lets you assign any bug to any email
address. Bugzilla lets you save custom queries, and choose a sort
order for the query. Bugzilla has bug dependencies.

Eazel and Helix and Red Hat and Mozilla are all using Bugzilla for
their own bug trackers I think. This should tell us something.

I don't think debbugs scales well; Debian maintainers only deal with a
few packages each, that is a tiny set of bugs compared to GNOME.

> And remember, Debbugs is GPL and Bugzilla is MPL.
> 

Honestly, I don't care at all.

Havoc