bug tracking

[John W. Eaton]

I'm bringing up this issue again because I think we really must do
something about bug tracking.

We (sort of) tried the savannah tracker briefly.  My impression is
that no one liked it very much.  So unless someone says otherwise, I
don't think that it will work for us.

Likewise for the  Debian bug tracker.

At one time, I think Thomas Weber was planning to set up a bug
reporting system (correct me if I'm wrong).  I'm not sure whether he
did.  I don't remember trying it out.

I have now set up an instance of bugzilla at bugs.octave.org.  We
could use this.  On the plus side, it is bugzilla, which is a fairly
comprehensive, well known, and widely used bug reporting system.  Some
negatives that I can see:

  * Requires creating an account and logging in to report bugs.  Will
    this prevent people from reporting problems?  I guess it does not
    pose too much of a problem for other projects.  For example, the
    bugzilla databases for Firefox and GCC appear to have plenty of
    reports in them...

  * The instance I have set up is a little slow.  I think this is a
    function of the hosting service where I have it set up.  If it
    becomes a real problem, then maybe we can move it somewhere else
    that performs better.

  * Using email to receive and process bug reports is not the norm
    with bugzilla, and that will be a big change for me at least as
    I'm very accustomed to handling bugs by email, not via some web
    form.  In the past, I have said that being able to handle bugs
    using email was essential to me, but now I think I could maybe get
    past this problem in exchange for having a good database of bug
    reports.  At this point, I'm much more interested in having a
    database of reports since the current method of keeping track of
    outstanding reports in an email folder is just not working
    anymore.

Whatever we choose (and I do think we must choose something) we will
need to start pointing people to the new system.  That means changing
the web site, manual, etc.  We will also need to rewrite the
bug_report function to just save info to a file and tell people to
paste that info in to the bug report form on the web.  I expect the
switch will take some time, and since it requires changes to the docs
and the bug_report function, I think we need to make these changes
before the next stable release.

Comments?

jwe