cross-site bug tracking

[Luis Villa]

On 4/11/07, Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at redhat.com> wrote:
> A little pontificating, sorry:  Over time I've become less and less of a
> fan of bugzilla.  Mostly because people see it as a hammer for all their
> nails: bug fixing, task assignment, customer defect resolution and even
> release management.  I think that other than "here's the issues that as
> a developer I know I need to fix" it does a crappy job.

Agree. In particular, bugzilla flags are the most horrible kludge in
the history of UI kludges.

And even for developers, it is only a least-bad option, like democracy
or capitalism.

> connecting defects to source control and letting fixes flow between
> projects is important.  But no one has taken that first step to say
> "we're going to go out and try to make this happen."

Well, Canonical has. I think their execution has been poor, but they
have had the right vision for several years now.

> Should it be us?  Does Red Hat want to fund it?  (Based on the history
> of ownership of both our internal and external tools, the answer is
> probably no.)  Can we organize a community around solving that problem?
> It's hard, since everyone has their own vision of what it should be, and
> very often it's "bugzilla, with even more stuff on top!"  And things
> don't really move.  It's hard to know what the next step is.  But I
> would love to hear more ideas.

My random-ass-guess? If you want traction, talk to the kernel people.
They have achieved agreement on an RCS, and appear to be reaching a
consensus that bug tracking is important (I hear talk that they are
hiring a bugmaster.) Tying bug tracking into git (git bisect-submit!)
is an obvious next step for them, and bugzilla is even more completely
broken for them than it is for anyone else.

No other big community has made the full jump to a modern distributed
RCS yet; my sense is that this is a prereq for modern bugtracking. So
start there.

(I think GNOME would be happy to switch away from bugzilla to
something distributed, but has ~ 0 manpower to write the tool in the
first place. You obviously know mozilla better than I do, but I'd be
shocked if they are ready to move away from bugzilla- too tied into
it.)

Luis