Stick!
On Feb 23, 2010, at 9:42 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
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!
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