On 02/01/2012 04:32 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
I'm a co-adniminstrator of a SourceForge host project and agree completely about the bug system, or tracker as they call it. We encourage bug reports to be sent to our mailing list, however, that requires the reporter join the list or one of us has to approve the message upon moderation and then remember to CC the reporter unless we get a mail that the reporter joined the list.
-1 to mailing list reporting for the reasons you mentioned, at least not for *all* bugs.
I don't have an answer but would steal any good ideas. :-) Is there a BTS that is easy to use? Debian's system is mostly done via email, at least that has been the extent of my involvement with it as a reporter and on followups. Bugzilla is used by various projects and I find it to be so-so. Trac is another.
Having used Bugzilla only as a user, I can say it's easily as bad as Source Forge if not worse. I've seen Trac but never used it.
Perhaps the most difficult thing is using the search properly. What I had happen recently was to search the Debian BTS for some key words on an issue I was having. Almost immediately the maintainer merged my report with an older one that described the same problem but used different terminology. Of course the maintainer recognized the similarity and acted on it. Does the SF.net tracker allow merging of reports? I've not checked as it's not something I've had to try and do as we get so few reports in the SF.net tracker.
Agree about searching. Two users experiencing the same issue usually have a completely different description, and so searching is often quite hard.
I don't think SF.net does allow merging dupes, and this partially the reason I started this thread, because duplicate tracking is stupid on Source Forge (unless I just don't know how to use it).
In a perfect world, each report that was marked as a dupe would contribute to keywords for the whole bug and before the user submits a new report, it would search all the items and duplicates and suggest that the user checks a handful of similar reports before/during submitting to see if they are duplicates.
Cheers, Matthew Brush _______________________________________________ Geany mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uvena.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geany
