Re: GRUB 2 development

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Saturday 10 November 2007 18:53, Marco Gerards wrote:
> The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
> outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
> and people sending in patches/bugreports.

Ah, really. For me, it is not "accidentally" but "naturally". ;)

> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
> anymore.

Hmm... I don't agree completely with this argument in my experience. When the 
aim is to track issues, email or wiki does not work so well (unless you use a 
kind of plugin to the wiki to make wiki a bug tracker). But for discussions, 
email or irc is much better. A bug tracker could work as well as email, if it 
supports email integration (which I tried with BugCommunicator, and failed 
due to many inconsistencies among email client implementations).

So, in reality, I used a bug tracker only for recording purpose. Bugs are 
registered, then discussions are done in email. Once something is determined 
(fixed, cancelled or whatever), the bug tracker is updated.

After then, I realized that a wiki was good enough for recording. I felt that 
it was easier to access and update info on a wiki than on a bug tracker.

Besides that, maybe as I said before, the real problem is noise. For GRUB 
Legacy, I mostly used email. When a message looked important, and I didn't 
have time to deal with it immediately, I marked the message as "important" so 
that I could look up for such messages later (a feature implemented by any 
modern MUA). If a message was just bogus, I just skipped it over.

Once I started to use the bug tracker on Savannah, of course, people started 
to post bugs there. Then, all messages were "important", because they were 
registered in the database. A lot of my time was consumed to deal with silly 
posts, such as just "GRUB does not work, help me!". So, instead of marking 
important messages, I had to mark non-important messages.

So did it make my life any easier to have a bug tracker? I hardly believe it. 
Therefore, these days, my usage of bug/issue trackers is to limit people who 
can post bugs to known people. This way, I can make my email-based-hand-made 
tracker a bit more structured and sharable with other people, yet not having 
noise very much.

Surely, this way also has a disadvantage that somebody else must submit a bug 
to a tracker every time when an important issue is raised by an unknown 
person. The question is, after all, whether bad messages should be deleted or 
good messages should be added... Personally, I think it is rather a rare 
event that an unknown person makes a good report, in comparison with from a 
known person, especially when taking it into account that a good reporter 
tends to become a repeater, thus become a known person quickly.

So I don't object to having a bug trakcer, but I recommend you considering 
carefully whether you want to encourage everybody to submit bugs to a bug 
tracker.

> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
> Perhaps someone else knows something better.

No, the current trend is trac or a trac-like system, such as redMine. :)

Okuji