On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 04:26:59PM -0700, Andrew P. Lentvorski wrote: >On Mon, 21 Oct 2002, David Dawes wrote: > >> This comes up from time to time. The bottom line is that having an >> XFree86 bug tracking system is of limited use unless the XFree86 developers >> use it. Since that's the group that it would impact the most, that's >> where the motivation for it should come from. BTW, is there an official >> Linux kernel bug tracking system? > >Yes. It's name is RedHat. ;)
It seems IBM is setting something up too, but like Red Hat and other vendors, they're motivated by their business needs (which is fine). >While the main development team may not be tracking bugs, the corporations >which have significant Linux efforts (RedHat, IBM, etc.) are. The main >development effort benefits from that infrastructure without acknowledging >it. Red Hat, Debian, and others do track XFree86 bugs too. The results of that are a useful contribution. It works because someone at each those organisations does the filtering and followup, and passes on the relevant reports information and/or fixes to the XFree86 developers. >Besides, "what Linux does" is not necessarily the "right" answer. Many >people complain that Linux development is not scaling because the kernel >complexity is exceeding the ability of one person to grasp it. And I hope >that no one is suggesting that XFree86 should use BitKeeper ... No, nobody is suggesting that XFree86 should use BitKeeper (at least I hope they're not :-) It's quite understandable that the Linux kernel does though, since that's apparently what motivated it in the first place (but I don't want to turn this thread into a BK pro/con argument). >The *BSD development teams provide examples of running and maintaining a >project over long periods of time--even longer than Linux. These projects >*do* have bug tracking systems. > >However, this is a political problem, not technical. Bug tracking will >appear when lack of it annoys the development team. So, your best bet to >get a bug tracking system implemented is simply to file lots of bug >reports in the mailing lists until it annoys the developers. ;) A bug tracking system will appear when the developers feel that it would make their life easier. I don't know too many of us that have the time to go back and look over lists of bugs. Most of us find it easier to deal with them as they come in. If too many come in, more don't get dealt with. The only way I see a bug tracking system working right now is if someone makes the commitment to administer it. That means cleaning it regularly to keep it up to date (filtering/categorising reports, removing duplicates and out of date reports, tracking XFree86 commits and closing reports when they've been fixed, etc). That would allow developers to look through it when they wanted to without forcing the overhead of keeping it up to date onto them. If the developers are asked to do all of this, they won't, and the result will be a nice bug tracking system full of bugs marked "unassigned". I don't see that as very useful. We could have taken that approach, but then everyone would be asking why their bugs haven't been looked at instead of why we don't have a bug tracking system. I'd prefer to not create the illusion. David _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
