Robert, I suspect your approach applies to a more informal less pressured environment, when most of the software is working and the time between bug reports is greater than the time to fix.
My experience is that during the early stage of a big development, the pressure is to convert designs into code, and that bug reports arrive faster than fixes which means that bugs must be prioritised (but not forgotten). Reports on a mailing list are great, but get mixed up with emails covering other topics. A separate bug list provides a quick way of looking up outstanding bugs and the priority assigned to fixing each bug. When a bug is fixed, the bug report is removed from the list and stored on a resolved bug list. (If the bug report were imediately deleted, it would leave open the possibility of someone using older software reporting a bug that had already been fixed.) Perhaps the halfway house is to request bug reports carry a keyword, such as bug, in the subject line so that individual recipients can use a mail rule to push the bug reports into a different mailbox folder. Everyone can then be happy - there is no separate buglist to maintain and the bug reports are held apart from other reports for quick searches. The only mandraulic activity is to pull out reports when they are reported as fixed. Regards PhilT -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Robert Osfield Sent: 25 July 2006 15:07 To: osg users Subject: Re: [osg-users] Bug Tracking System? On 7/25/06, Daniel Larimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Would the community be interested in me hosting a Bugzilla server > configured to post bug reports to this mailing list? It would provide a > useful means of searching for known bugs and tracking their status. I *detest* bugzillam, and would certainly not use it, or encourage its use. A long while back, when I lead a closed source team, we set bugzilla database for logging all software bugs thinking its was the right thing to do. In hindsight it was worst things we did as a dev team, it placed an artificial non human barrier between the one reporting the bug and the ones fixing it. It increased the amount of time to track down and fix bugs and it created ill will. The fact is that OpenSceneGraph has gone from nothing to a leading scene graph technology without bugzilla, this is testament at how little impact such tools really have, if they were essential then we would have been successful. I would actually attribute part of that success to not using something like bug zilla, but promoting the publication of bugs through the mailing list, and fixes things as soon as possible. Now when it comes to tracking bug fixes then there is the ChangeLog, cvs can produce a full ChangeLog at a moments notice, and bug fixes are all noted in the submission messages. Searching the mailing, or even asking the mailing list is another means for tracking reported bugs. Now this might seem an extra hurdle that if you don't want to really talk to anybody its a pain, but for me engaging with people is what gets things fixed so its something that should be encouraged. For particular problem areas, like flaky OpenGL drivers we can use the wiki. http://www.openscenegraph.org/osgwiki/pmwiki.php/Tasks/OpenGLConformance Or for stubbon issues that need resolution: http://www.openscenegraph.org/osgwiki/pmwiki.php/Tasks/BugResolution Note, that this system for bug reporting, and fixing is a low maintaince one, it happens as a natural part of developing the software. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
