Re: Octave-Forge bugs in the tracker?

[Carnë Draug]

2011/7/24 Thomas Weber <address@hidden>:
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 01:45:37PM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>> On 23 July 2011 13:13, c. <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
> 2) If my feeling in 1) is true, than forcing a move to a different VCS
> onto those developers is plain wrong. I do not know care a second how
> much hypothetical advantages there might be: if the -forge developers
> don't come forward themselves with the wish to move, than everybody
> outside should just stop pushing them - and yes, that includes -core
> developers!
>
> [...]
>
>> > One more thing to consider is that, especially taking into account
>> > the VERY limited work force taking care of octave-forge at the
>> > moment, I would suggest to think twice before making "revolutionary"
>> > changes that would require a non negligible amount of work. OF is a
>> > quite successful project that, thanks to the great hard work done by
>> > many in the past, currently gets on with very little effort by very
>> > few people (mostly Søren only). Sure, there is lots of ways OF can
>> > and should be improved, but past attempts to throw it all away and
>> > start over have not gone very far

I'd just like to put things in contexts a little bit. This discussion
started on the octave-forge mailing //exactly// because of the very
limited work force (
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=27834830 ).

Bugs have been reported on the mailing list, sometimes with patches
attached that are never applied or even commented. There's work, from
part of the users, that if not logged somewhere is wasted. Some people
(me included), think that a bug tracker would help a lot. We already
have the bug tracker. To change the current ways, all it needs to be
done is change the instructions from "mail us the bug report" to "fill
a report on our bug tracker" (there's a page with instructions).

It was suggested to move to savannah (instead of start using our SF
bug tracker) so that bugs could easily be assigned from octave-forge
to octave and vice-versa when users don't do it correctly. That also
makes sense to me. We are not (at least not me) trying to merge the
projects, just to bring them closer a little bit to make this kind of
things easier.

>> The amount of work to do here is very limited. Moving from SourceForge
>> to Savannah is basically just re-uploading the code and updating a few
>> urls in the web pages. I don't see a reason to move the web hosting.
>
> If you don't move everything, you have two sides to somehow keep in
> sync, including user accounts for the administrators and whatever.
> How do I announce a new release from Savannah on the web pages on SF,
> for example?

I agree that the project should be all together. If we move, we should
move everything.

>> We can always tell Savannah to CC a particular maintainer when a bug
>> discussion starts, the maintainer can then go to Savannnah and follow
>> that bug there.
>
> Which means more work for the maintainer, who has to follow-up on
> Savannah.

How's that more work? If there's no way to make Savannah send an
e-mail to the mailing list, we could have a developer account of
octave-forge whose e-mail is the octave-forge mailing list address.
Every new bug report and change would be sent to the mailing list. No
need for extra work whatsoever. Since the current method is that new
bugs are reported in the mailing, and discussion on how to fix it is
also done on the mailing list, this does not mean an increase of
traffic on the mailing list.

>> As for the rest, we can use a collaborative maintenance approach where
>> we have a common publicly available list of problems so that anyone
>> can go to that list and take care of the problems.
>
> Which means more work for the maintainer, who has to follow-up on
> Savannah.

Savannah should mail the maintainer if there's anything new. It's up
to him/her to delete or read the e-mail and do something about it.
Exactly what happens with the mailing list now. The big advantage is
that if at a moment, no one can do anything about it, when someone
comes around that can, the reports and patches are already there.


Note: I'm CC the octave-forge mailing list so that they can give their
opinion as well (whole thread here
https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2011-July/024243.html
and here 
https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2011-July/024259.html
)