[csw-maintainers] moving along...

[Maciej Bliziński]

2011/8/6 Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org>:
> Maciej Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org> writes:
>
>> Mantis is not written for
>> the number of projects that we have. It is meant to handle a two digit
>> number of projects, and we have a four digit one
>
> Debian is using a BTS for a bigger magnitude, isn't it? What about using
> their system? Just a thought...

Debian BTS / Debbugs has indeed work with a large number of packages,
and the sources are available[1].  However, if you the summary on
Wikipedia, it it's an email based system, and although you can search
and view bugs from a web interface, the main input and output is
email.  What I like about it, is that there is the reportbug utility
which drives the bug reporting process.  Overall, it feels dated.

Another system that is in use, is Bugzilla. It's used by e. g. Red
Hat.  It is a web based system, and if it has an email input, it's
only an addon.

In the case of a packaging project, the main consideration is this:
the user who reports the issue, has a rough idea against which package
the issue needs to be filed. It still can be fuzzy in the case of
split packages, e.g. cups vs cupsd vs cupsclient, but let's assume
that the user knows which package the bugs belongs to.  What mantis
does for us, is that it shows the list of packages to the user, and
knows which maintainer is assigned to which package.  This is a great
feature.  I talked once to a Gentoo developer and their bugzilla
installation.  I learned that their bugzilla does not have that
mapping, and a human is necessary for the bug to be routed to the
right person.  In this light, Mantis does a pretty good job for us,
and if we look for a new system, we need to make sure that it has an
easy user interface to map from packages to maintainers.  That also
requires having some form of abstraction that we can use to represent
packages. In Mantis it's projects, but in a different bug tracker it
could be a different abstraction, e.g. a component or simply a tag.

I'm with Ben on that I'd rather look for a way to restore the
catalog→mantis synchronization, the cheaper the better, and go from
there.  I don't want discourage anyone from looking for a better
bugtracker - if we had a better bugtracker, I'm all for it! There
already is a wiki page about the topic[3], so if anyone makes
progress, I'd encourage them to share it.

Maciej

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/debbugs-source/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_bug_tracking_system
[3] http://wiki.opencsw.org/project-bugtracker