Re: What do you want me to do? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Robert Treat wrote:

>On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 15:28, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>  
>
>>Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Robert Treat wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>>
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>>>>I know most people have talked about using bugzilla, but is anyone
>>>>familiar with GNATS?  I'm currently rereading Open Sources and there's a
>>>>paragraph or two mentioning it's use and the fact that it can be
>>>>interfaced with completely by email.
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>FreeBSD uses it almost exclusively and it supports email interaction with
>>>the database, but I don't think there are very many good GUI front ends
>>>for it (or, at least, not that I've seen) ...
>>>
>>> 
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>>No.
>>
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>
>personal axe to grind?  
>

er, no. I was only agreeing with Marc about GUI interfaces. What axe to 
grind do you imagine I could have? Postgres is a fine product, and I 
have been very glad to find that its development process is very open in 
fact as well as in name. I want to see it succeed. To that end I want to 
free Bruce and Tom and everybody else from as much drudgery as possible 
and at the same time make finding out the state of things easier. That's 
all.

>I've never used it, but it's been around a long
>time, allows for interaction completely through email (which is how we
>do things now), has a web front end for anyone who wants to use it to
>use, and as i understand it has a tcl based desktop app for folks to use
>as well.  seems it's being dismissed prematurely imho.
>
Every person wishing to submit a bug will have to have send-pr installed 
or else we'll get lots of reports not broken up into fields. That 
doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me.

>
>  
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>>A few other thoughts:
>>. the Samba team have apparently abandoned their own tool and moved to 
>>bugzilla
>>. if we used bugzilla this might give some impetus to the bugzilla 
>>team's efforts to provide pg as a backend (maybe we could help with that)
>>. it would seem slightly strange to me for an RDBMS project to use a bug 
>>tracking system that was not RDBMS-backed
>>    
>>
>
>we serve far more static pages on the website than we do database driven
>ones... 
>
*nod* but there has been talk of moving to bricolage, hasn't there?

>the software we distribute is housed on fileservers and sent via
>ftp, we dont expect people to store and retrieve it from a database...
>

you're reaching now ...

>our mailing lists software actually uses another db product in fact...
>let's just get the right tool for the job... 
>  
>

Yes. I agree. Bugs (including enhancements) strike me as a classic case 
of data that belongs in a database.

>  
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>>. developers are far more likely to be familiar with bugzilla
>>    
>>
>
>developers are far more likely to be familiar with windows and mysql as
>well...
>

c'mon ...

>
>  
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>>. are there any active developers without web access? If not, why is 
>>pure email interaction important?
>>    
>>
>
>for the same reason mailing lists work better than message boards...
>it's just easier. i'm much more likely to read an email list the scroll
>through web forms, and if i am going to respond to a bug report, i'm
>much mroe likely to if i can hit "reply" and start typing than if i have
>to fire up a browser to do it.
>

Tom explicitly said he *didn't* want a system where email poured 
straight into the bugtrack db.

Yes, it is a different way of doing things, and it takes getting used to.

>
>  
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>>Bugzilla is far from perfect. But it's getting better.
>>
>>    
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>
>don't get me wrong, i like bugzilla and all, but theres no need to put
>blinders on...
>

I don't. But I do think the current processes can stand improvement.


cheers

andrew