On Nov 27, 2010, at 11:22 PM, Peter Hosey wrote: > On Nov 27, 2010, at 21:18:42, John Bailey wrote: >>> 2. We still lock out user submission of Issues, but allow voting (star >>> system). We encourage the use of the forums for users to submit their bugs, >>> following which we confirm or dismiss them. If confirmed, then a dev >>> creates an issue in the Google Code tracker to represent the bug. Users who >>> report well described bugs on the forums gain access to the Google Code >>> issue tracker. >> >> This is an inordinate amount of overhead. Requiring a developer to open a >> ticket for an issue is a waste of the developer's already severely limited >> time. > > Currently, that time (of helpers as well as developers) is wasted on closing > duplicate tickets. On Growl, we do exactly what Jordan has suggested—use > Google Code, file tickets ourselves—and we have nearly eliminated duplicate > tickets*. I can't predict how well such a system would scale to Adium, but > it's been working very well for Growl.
I'd like to point out that this is not a factor of using google code in itself, but by merely closing ticket creation to a relatively few number of people. I also question how much additional time that would add by requiring people (developers or helpers) to much more attentively track issues reported though side-channels (forums, email, irc, twitter, etc). I am not convinced this would be a net time saver for an application as complex as Adium. Additionally, this policy seems very hostile to our users, considering our current policy on bug reporting. (By which I mean, taking ticket creation away, not the idea in abstract.) It is important to remember that many very valid bugs are discovered by users with different use cases and habits than the developers, in the absence of a VERY active development community (with developers able to devote their full time to the project) I feel like this is not a communication path we can shutdown casually. Adium is not a system service you hardly ever think about after installing, it is an application our users intentionally use every day to do stuff, and having enfranchised users is important. I believe allowing user created tickets is important for this. >> Additionally, how… do you achieve integration between the mercurial >> repository and Google Code so that you can close tickets with a commit >> message? > > I'm pretty sure GCH doesn't support this. At any rate, we're not using it on > Growl, since we primarily host our repositories ourselves (our GCH default > repo is a mirror of our development repo). Knowing which ticket a commit is related to (and the inverse) is a very very important thing, and from a development perspective non-negotiable for a project the size of Adium. If we cannot associate tickets and commits from check-in messages, than I'd say this is a deal breaker for any alternative system, including google code. That said, I wouldn't mind being able to better track branches and forks of our repo within our management system—especially if we want to encourage this development paradigm. (I would suggest something like bitbucket, however they seem to still be having some occasional reliability issues.) Overall, I'd say if we can't find a better system we do what work we can to update our own trac more maintainable. Also, I agree with Colin and John in that having our own system we have complete control and ownership over has intangible benefits.
