Re: Does the bug tracker actually work?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 06:36:17PM -0400 or thereabouts, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Paul Warren <pdw@ex-parrot.com> writes: 
> > OK, so what is needed to switch to eg. Bugzilla?  Nobody has yet has
> > spoken out in favour of keeping Debbugs, although it has been suggested
> > that flaky hardware may be part of the problem.
> 
> Telsa has strongly objected to the lack of an email interface, but I
> do think the other issues outweigh this (waiting for Telsa to flame
> me...)

Havoc, would I do that? 

(reaches for lighter)

Yeah, my thing about the email interface is because we don't all
have permanent connections to the net. I'm lucky. I do. But it's
not very fast. And whilst I have a better machine now, last year
I was using a machine where Netscape took a minute to start and
rapidly munched memory and would start to thrash if used for too
long. The machine would run Gnome itself fine. But oh dear, Netscape..

I came to loathe bugzilla then, because it took me about two 
minutes just to download the "enter a new bug" page at the start
of Bugzilla. It takes me less than a minute to do everything
short of entering the actual text of a bug with bug-buddy.
Similarly with mailing to a debbugs system without using bug-buddy.
It takes me a lot longer with bugzilla, just because it requires
netscape running (and behaving) and downloading an awful lot of
info before I can click on something. When you're paying by
the minute for online time (not that I am, but still :)), this
kind of thing becomes an issue. 

And you can't use Lynx (which is faster, in my experience) with 
Bugzilla very easily. Even if you change your settings to be able 
to use queries, you still have the problem that you get a form of 
eight lines, and eight lines of 80 chars is not a lot. So I would 
stuff as much as I could into one line and severely upset the people 
who read the reports in Netscape. 

By comparison, I could just email things to a debbugs system. 
And it was good. It's _much_ better for crap links, slow links,
intermittently-up links, and crap hardware which means you
try to avoid using netscape :) 

On the other hand, I do understand that this is from a user
point of view, and someone has to collate and sort bugs; and
that Bugzilla is far better from the point of many developers.

Telsa