Re: [Sbcl-devel] Meta: Right place for bugs?

[Nikodemus S. <nik...@ra...>]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 11:18 PM, Christophe Rhodes <cs...@ca...> wrote:

> Why would any bug tracker be any less of a wasteland?

James and Nathan (at least) had cogent arguments why it could be --
which doesn't mean that it automatically is so.

> What I would say we actually have a deficiency of is people triaging,
> reproducing and fixing bugs

Quite.

I wonder if a tracker could help with triage, which in turn might even
lead to increased fixing by not-very-active parties. Currently there
is a tendency for BUGS to consist mostly of "hard" bugs, which is
non-optimal. Arguably this is a problem of discipline, not of the
system itself -- but it may well be an artifact of the system we are
using as well.

I know at least some of us tag our SBCL emails to stay on top of
things, but this doesn't really scale. You don't see my tags, and I
don't see your tags.

Launchpad seems to have a decentish email interface:

  http://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/EmailInterface

To move this thing forward (hopefully not too autocratically -- I just
don't want to spend more time arguing back and forth), I created a
placeholder SBCL project on Launchpad to experiment with, and added
some of our BUGS (384-429) there, plus one item not yet in BUGS.

  http://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl

To avoid misunderstandings: THIS IS NOT THE OFFICIAL BUG REPOSITORY.

My impression so far: assuming you have a GPG enabled mailclient the
email interface seems ok: I can submit bugs using it, and manage
existing ones. The web interface seems less deadly than many. I could
live with this -- and for once I actually understand what various
bug-statuses could be used for.

Feel free to register to launchpad and work with those bugs, and add
new/old ones from BUGS ... and speak up on your impressions. I would
especially appreciate informed comparisons to, say, debbugs, RT and
Track.

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus