Hi Tim, --- Timothy Stack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > hi, > > I'd like to file a bug report stating that the > current system for > reporting bugs sucks. :)
Thank you for your bug report ;) > It seems to me that there are just too many people > with problems that are > going unanswered. Sure, we'll exchange some initial > mail, but in the end > people are just too busy with other things and > Dalibor can't do it all by > himself. Then the problem just gets lost in the > archive and its too much > of a pain to go back through trying to figure out > what has and hasn't been > fixed yet. I mostly agree. IANLT (I am not Linus Torvalds), so I don't really scale that well (and I'm actually busy with other things, too). So any help is highly appreciated. If a bug database is a good way to get more people to contribute more regularly, or to help existing developers, that's fine with me. But, we've already had a bug database before and that one died a slow death. I can't say what the reasons were, because it died before I got involved with this project. When I looked into it last year, it had become a trashbin for users to file bug reports that noone looked into. See my rant here http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2002-June/008364.html It was abandoned, although you can still get all the bug reports as a website archive here : http://www.kaffe.org/~jim/brainfood-website-plus-bugs.tar.gz So, has the situation changed since last June? In my impression, kaffe still has a rather small number of regular contributors. Its user base has grown, though, as can be seen by the massive increase in mail traffic (see http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/ for stats) since last February, when the project was effectively asleep. We are now at 10 times the volume since about a year ago, while the number of "regulars" has stayed about the same. While my rant was in place then, Jukka Santala has got it right in the end : in http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2002-June/008383.html he says "But once 1.0.7 is out, _hopefully_ the developer (Or at least user/tester) base is going to grow significantly. Keeping up with the influx may be hard then; but perhaps we can just wait and see for now." . What Jim wanted to do, was to keep FAQ.Knows-Bugs up to date (http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2002-June/008401.html). It didn't really work out, for a lot of good reasons. A single person can manage the bugs in their mail queue, but it doesn't scale well when the you start getting more bug reports than you can fix. Especially when you are busy managing releases, server moves, developing a new build system, and keeping everything running smoothely in general. And he does a great job, in my opinion. So my question is: would having a bug report system lead to more bugs getting fixed, or would it just be a public mail dump? My theory why the original bug database died, is that the original core set of maintainers refocused on other things, which is a normal thing in life. I wouldn't want to spend my life just developing kaffe, either ;) As I said, IANLT. Unfortunately, they seem to have mostly missed the opportunity to "raise" new maintainers. That explains, in my opinion, the growing pains we experience now. And I didn't think about it either. My proposal to improve the developement process, would be to go with your proposal, and set up a bug database system again. But also to share the load on more shoulders and recruit more people willing to take over some responsibility that comes with the priviledge of cvs write access. For example, I'm not playing the check-in guy because I love to check in stuff, but because many patches simply don't get reviewed and checked in otherwise. And most people seem to be reluctant to test what's out there in form of a patch, unless it has been checked into CVS and broke something they care about. ;) That's O.K. for me, as long as we get the bug reports while the wounds from living on the bleeding edge are fresh. It's rather painful to track things down months after they have been checked in. For another example, if anyone looks at my merging efforts with JanosVM so far, they'll see that I've mostly left out the improvements the JanosVM team has made to the core VM. I don't feel comfortable breaking stuff I don't understand much about, and prefer to play safe, fixing bugs where I know what I'm doing. In my case, that's core libraries and compilers. In my experience, there are enough things left to fix there, so that I don't get to learn enough about the core VM to be able to make judgements there. Now, if everybody would just sit and wait for me to learn enough about the core VM to be able to merge in the missing bits, that would simply not happen in the next few years. ;) > So, basically, does anyone know of a bug reporting > tool that can be setup > on the web site without much trouble? Before we just pick a tool that can be set up without much trouble, I'd like to hear what people expect from a bug reporting tool. Here's my take: I'd like to have a bug reporting tool for the single purpose of being able to browse bugs more easily, and marking them as fixed. I want to have all the traffic associated with a bug to go over the mailing list, because it gives people a better chance to find someone who knows, than to rely on those who know to find the time to browse the incoming bug reports. Additionaly, it lets people chip in when things are going into the wrong direction. For an example of that, see my previous attempts at replacing some of the native libraries with pure java veriants. The idea appeared reasonable to me, sitting on a fast laptop where the jit3 code beats the native library at some operations. It turned out to have many drawbacks that I didn't think about. Now, I think we've reached a solution where the pure java libraries are provided as an extra option at configure time, that gets selected automatically if the native libraries are not available. The discussion leading to that all happening would not have necessarily taken place if it had been constrained to the context of an obscure bug report. If someone is familiar with bug tracking tools, and could get one such beast set up to that, I'd be happy. I'd be happy to hear other opinions, too. cheers, dalibor topic __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. 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