On Sunday, 15 June 2014 at 15:37:22 UTC, Andrew Edwards wrote:
Observe the following truths:
1) Issue tricking and resolution are kept separate in our
community
2) That which is not visible garners no attention
Presently, we file bugs/issues through issues.dlang.org, the
maintenance of which is no small task and is certainly
appreciated. However, it is an environment completely detached
from where the actual work is performed. As such, it breeds
neglect on the part of the developers: not because they do not
care, but rather because they do not see.
Take issue #143 for instance. It is the oldest open issue on
the DLang Issue Tracking System. Submitted by Jarrett
Billingsley on May 17, 2006, it received one comment two days
later but was ignored for four years before Michal Minich made
the second comment. Another two years went by before Martin
Nowak addressed the issue, which Walter promptly reverted
(reason unknown). The end result? Eight years flew by and the
issue remains unresolved.
This happens because we have two separate systems (one tracking
problems, another tracking the resolution), both of which
compete for the same precious and extremely limited resource:
the volunteer time of developers.
Already proven a valuable resource, GitHub offers the tools
necessary to resolve this problem. The "issues" feature (not
currently activated for any D-Programming-Language repo) allows
us to set milestones (with due dates), assign tasks, and create
and apply labels (multiple where required).
Observe the following:
https://github.com/AndrewEdwards/druntime/issues?state=open
Note how quickly you can see the total number of open issues,
traverse to any category, and identify what is important for a
given milestone. We can even track our progress toward a
specific milestone in seconds, or which issues we created or
was assigned to us.
By using this feature, we will eliminate the fire and forget
problem currently observed with Bugzilla. We will be able to
automatically link resolution to issue, by a mere mention of
the issue number within the resolution. Issues become far more
visible and, consequently, are not so easily forgotten.
A complete win in my book.
-Andrew
I agree with this quite a lot. If for nothing else, I agree with
this because I think it makes the most sense to have the place we
do pull requests be the same place we track issues. There are a
few other reasons I agree with this, but the point is that I
would very much like to see this happen.
