On Tuesday 10 April 2007, John Cherry wrote: > - Is the work on defect tracking across projects that is being > done with the Launchpad site something that can be leveraged > by the community?
as long as Launchpad is not Free software, i doubt it. personally, i find bugzilla and the rest of the centralized, online bug systems an increasingly poor fit for Free software development. i'd love to see a truly distributed bug system, perhaps bringing to bug tracking what git is bringing / has brought to distributed scm. trying to bridge the various bug systems is a pragmatic approach and starts to bridge the gap between various cross-stream sources, but falls far short of addressing other very real issues that exist such as: - providing a way for upstream to know about these down/cross-stream links - how to cater to those who would like to get involved with Free software but have only intermitent or expensive internet connections. - a shared identity system so one can identify the probable quality and/or value of the reports/comments - a distributed search / data mining facility so common bugs fixed upstream that affect multiple other upstream projects can be agregated and dealt with. the last point is very important from the perspective of an upstream project as it really means that launchpad does next to nothing for upstream unless upstreams start using the same centralized system. for example, see this report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/80665 which links to this: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108440 as you can see, there is no mention on bugs.kde.org of the launchpad notice. which means that anything posted on the launchpad bug goes unnoticed by me as an upstream participant. if you notice on those bugs, the reporters graciously taken the time to post to each bug, meaning we expect twice the efforts from them to make it work well. that's inane. multiply by N projects and it can quickly get out of hand as cross stream linkage grows. i think launchpad is a nice solution for canonical's team to keep track of what they are doing, but as someone sitting upstream i really don't find it very interesting. making it better would mean: - making it Free software so other projects can use it on their self-hosted systems and so we aren't investing in a single point of potential failure - be able to move comments from the launchpad bug post to upstream's tracker with a single click. you wouldn't want all comments moved automatically as they are made as they are often specific to downstream; one could view the bugs as two branches in a scm tree, really, where one would like to merge patches (in this case, comments and file uploads) back and forth with ease - provide an offline mechanism, e.g. be able to run a local copy of the bug tracking software with select bugs downloaded and then sync'd. really, it starts to look a lot like the best thing we could do is get rid of the "bugs in a database" model and move to an scm based system which would give us distributed tracking and possibly even distributed reporter identity (a lot easier than most identity systems since there's no really "valuable" information tied to the identity; it's just a convenient way to track conversation). there could be a web front end to it and for searching the easiest thing to do would be to index it using a second tool such as strigi which is designed specifically for indexing large bodies of information and allowing them to be efficiently searched. the bonus with the latter is that the offline version would already be fully ready for desktop integration as systems such as strigi are being integrated with the Free software desktop more and more. ah, if only i had more time to work on other projects. or a clone army. that'd be cool. or scary, depending on your viewpoint. ;) -- Aaron J. Seigo humru othro a kohnu se GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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