> I didn't come to the conclusion that we just should leave everything > as-is. I was hoping to either get to a point where either we come up > with a sensible way to provide a bug number or other identifier for > things we typically want to link to from commits, or decide that the bug > number isn't really all that useful and get rid of it.
Well, we already have bug numbers in bugs submitted via the website and they seem to work pretty well.
What if we add an email interface that creates bugs with IDs, but nothing more than that? I'm thinking a special address such as pgsql-create-bug@postgresql.org that creates the bug ID and resends to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org CCing the bug reporter, after changing Subject to include the bug ID and the From/Sender to an address under our control (to avoid DKIM problems with the reporter's domain). It would work normally using pgsql-bugs from that point on.
If we have our system preserve References/In-Reply-To headers, I think it would even work to add a CC the special address in the middle of a regular thread in a mailing list (any mailing list, not just pgsql-bugs) to spawn a new bug.
We could do something like that yes, and we've discussed doing it before. It would work as long as we have some sort of "moderation queue" on it, otherwise we'll be assigning and reposting a lot of spam.
But let's not go jump at things left and right ATM. We already have another thread discussing a possible bugtracker (where a prototype has at some point been built and is shown). And we discussed yet another way (based off the cf app) at the fosdem devmeeting. So while we should certainly keep discussing things, let's not build something that does part of it just to end up with a mish mash of different things later.
