I've recently looked at some of the capabilities of bug reports on various hosted places.
* One appealing feature is using github (since we'll have a mirror there), but it doesn't look like it allows generating reports from emails or some way to generate reports anonymously (perhaps using the api, but this complicates things). Also, it doesn't look like you can get email notifications, and no attachements. And another problem is that people need to create accounts there instead of managing it from a central place. * Most other similar places are similarly limited (launchpad does have attachements, but is limited in a similar way). * The most promising thing that I've seen is a pair of websites: tenderapp.com and lighthouse.com. IIUC, the intention of the former is as a front end for users to post "issues", and for the latter to be dealing with more concrete bug reports. The interfaces fr both are similarly polished, but there are some differences: the first can accept new reports from anyone (no login needed), and the second has more of the usual stuff you expect a bug report tool to have. In addition, the second one can be integrated with a repository: accepting keywords in emails that can do almost anything (close bugs, assign them, etc). For companies, I think that the intention is for some QA department to deal with the first and file bugs against the second (with a way to link the two). The main problem with using only lighthouse that I see is that bugs cannot be filed by unregistered users -- it is possible to send an email that is coming from a registered user (eg "[email protected]") and have that create a report, but then the bug seems to come from that address and I don't see a way to CC the real bug reporter. In any case, I can't really allocate more time for this. I was hoping that Sam, being the most vocal about how gnats is ancient, would take it on, but he's not interested. So, in case someone wants to look further into these options, and either find a way to make one of them do what we need, or find another option that does that, or even play with gnats itself to make it do the extra things that these tools do: please contact me and I'll tell you what the basic requirements are, and I'll help in finding a way to migrate the current bug DB. Otherwise, it looks like sticking with the current setup is the most profitable. (This is not an attempt at starting a discussion about these things, I've spent enough time trying to figure them out...) -- ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life! _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
