[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Bug tracking (was: 1.6RC1 - Acquistions -possiblebugs)

[Dan Scott]

On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 21:16 -0400, Mike Rylander wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Karen Schneider <kgs at esilibrary.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Wills,Steve <wills at nelinet.net> wrote:
> >>>KGS: A separate mailing list, evergreen-ils-bugs?
> >>
> >> Some agreed upon procedure such as, adding a ticket number to a thread
> >> subject line as soon as it's clear that a thread is addressing a bug or
> >> bug set, maybe? I am not sure a separate list is necessary but it sure
> >> would be nice to be able to sync lists to Trac with a simple grep or
> >> something so that bugs don't fall off the end of the world.
> >>
> >> Stev3
> >
> > I was thinking that as well. Either would work; it's a matter of
> > education and enforcement.
> >
> > Again, I notice how you all turned pale and fell on your backs when I
> > said web board ;-) but it would be very convenient. Imagine one place
> > that had not only our conversations but piped all the commits, new bug
> > reports, etc.... (Hey, it's the status quo for homebrewing... ;-) )
> >
> >
> 
> To be clear, for me it's not just a visceral aversion to "boards",
> it's that they just do not work well for me.  They are an impediment.
> Email fits very well with the way I develop, and gmail is REALLY good
> at searching my email.  A board or forum requires a whole lot more
> investment of time every time I need to look at something, and I've
> yet to see one that is really good at search -- at least in the way I
> need it to be, where I can find the one specific message I need, and
> not just be dropped at the beginning of a 15-page run-up discussion.
> I'm sure it /is/ convenient for those that need to see an overview and
> look at the history of a discussion, but it's terrible (again, at
> least for me) for actually /having/ the discussion.
> 
> What we really need, IMO, is Google Wave.  Then the "forumers" can
> have their web-board view, and we "emailers" can have our gmail-esque
> view.  So, who wants to lobby Mountain View for some beta accounts?
> ;)
> 

I'm still waiting for my Wave invite (sigh).

In the meantime, for meeting the expressed desires for both the mailing
list & the web board camps, there is software like FudForum that
provides both a web forum and a mailing list interface for the same
discussion (I've run that in the past for a neighbourhood group); or
Google Groups (we use that for the Conifer discussion list). 

So we were initially talking about "How are we going to track & hold
discussions about bugs?", and Bugzilla and Trac have been mentioned by a
few people. I would like to float the idea of adopting Launchpad at
http://launchpad.net as a place where we can create, track & subscribe
to bugs (thereby being emailed every time a given bug to which you are
subscribed is updated); see http://bugs.launchpad.net

In addition, Launchpad brings along the ability to:
  * manage translations, including an interface that can jump start
translation with suggestions from the existing set of over 1 million
strings (https://translations.launchpad.net/) - you know I like this a
lot
  * build up a knowledge base / FAQ (http://answers.launchpad.net/) -
you can convert bugs to questions, which is a well-thought-out feature
  * codify feature enhancement requests
(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/) which would be one way of sharing
what features we're working on & how we plan to achieve that & what that
means for users & writers
  * offer a bzr mirror of our SVN repository, giving us the ability to
to relate branches to specific features / bug fixes and giving us the
possibility of a more distributed development model (of course,
nothing's stopping people from mirroring it to bzr or git or hg or
whatever themselves, but if we adopted the model of stabilizing a
feature or bug fix in a branch and only merging that branch to
trunk/mainline once we're confident it's clean, then we could probably
reduce some of the current churn)

It would be a bit of a jump from the current do-it-yourself spirit of
the self-hosted SVN + Trac instance, but maybe it would be easier to
just approve accounts at Launchpad and let launchpad.net worry about
system administration for this. I would certainly rather just let the
Launchpad translation tool run and welcome translations than have to
worry about maintaining a Pootle instance on a server somewhere. And it
would be nice for community members to be able to do most of this work
using a single account, rather than requiring an account for Pootle and
an account for Trac and an account for SVN...

Anyway, I've been meaning to throw the Launchpad option out there. 

At some point, we're going to have to decide what we want to do with all
of this. Do we want to try and sort this out shortly after 1.6.0.0 gets
out the door?