cross-site bug tracking

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Luis Villa wrote:

> On 4/11/07, Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at redhat.com> wrote:
>> A little pontificating, sorry:  Over time I've become less and less of a
>> fan of bugzilla.  Mostly because people see it as a hammer for all their
>> nails: bug fixing, task assignment, customer defect resolution and even
>> release management.  I think that other than "here's the issues that as
>> a developer I know I need to fix" it does a crappy job.
>
> Agree. In particular, bugzilla flags are the most horrible kludge in
> the history of UI kludges.
>
> And even for developers, it is only a least-bad option, like democracy
> or capitalism.

As always, the choice is:

1. Continue to make incremental fixes to a system that is engineered 
suboptimally.  Low risk, low cost, moderate reward.

2. Design a totally kick-ass new system that is engineered optimally -- 
unless, of course, it isn't.  High risk, high cost, high reward.

> Well, Canonical has. I think their execution has been poor, but they
> have had the right vision for several years now.

Their vision is wrong because, no matter the architecture decisions 
they've made, they *think* they're smart enough to build it as a 
proprietary application -- and they're not.  This is *exactly* the class 
of application that *must* be open source if it's got any hope of success.

> No other big community has made the full jump to a modern distributed
> RCS yet; my sense is that this is a prereq for modern bugtracking. So
> start there.

+1 to this.  In theory, anyway.

> (I think GNOME would be happy to switch away from bugzilla to
> something distributed, but has ~ 0 manpower to write the tool in the
> first place. You obviously know mozilla better than I do, but I'd be
> shocked if they are ready to move away from bugzilla- too tied into
> it.)

And this is the problem in a nutshell.  Everyone agrees with the idea in 
theory, but no one has the manpower to make it happen in practice.

--g

-- 
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"