[Gaim-cabal] bug trackers

[Luke S. <lsc...@us...>]

Before I open this up to a wider and noisier audience on -devel, I
thought I'd ask here.

What bug tracking software have you all interacted with?  What are
the pros and cons?

SF is poor: it provides users the ability to modify all sorts of
things they don't understand our use of, like priority or category.
Users regularly do things like think that "logging" means "starting
gaim."  It offers poor filtering abilities, and its view of the bug's
history is less than ideal.  I cannot interact with it via email.

Bugzilla is in my opinion worse.  It offers insufficient history in
many cases, unless I obsessively save emails.  It is simply too huge
for our needs, being better at handling something like gnome or
redhat with tons of unrelated or semi-related projects than something
like gaim.  It is UBBER confusing.

RT: it is unfamiliar to most people.  I can interact with it via web
or email or command line client.  It offers a top down view of a bug,
vrs. SF's bottom up view.  It lets us control what users can set,
without confusing them.  Downside: changing things can take several
pages in the web interface.  it offers good filtering.  It has an
integratable faq tool (RTFM).  I've used it before.

Trac:  it integrates well with subversion.  It doesn't seem to
integrate with any other verson control system.  It doesn't seem to
let me interact with it by email.  Its unfamiliar to most of us.  Its
web interface has been praised by several people I've talked to who
have used it.

My own feeling is to go with RT/RTFM, primarily based on the fact
that I can interact with it by email and the fact that I've used it
before, and found it more usable than I do either SF or bugzilla.  My
feeling about trac is that its a significant plus if we stick with
svn, but doesn't offer much over sf if we go with any other system.

luke