Re: Bug Tracking

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 03/30/2010 01:39 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> I like the concept, but I'm not sure about implementing it because it
> seems fragile to me.  For example, the bug reporting script will break
> if the bug tracker on savannah changes, and we don't really have much
> control over what changes are made to savannah.  Even if we did,
> linking the bug reporting script too closely with the current tracker
> means that it is difficult to switch in the future.  So unless someone
> has a good way to decouple the reporting script and tracker, I think
> the best solution is to just display the information that should be
> reported in the tracker and ask the user to submit the report.

For what it's worth, Fedora implemented the automatic bug reporting tool 
(ABRT) that triggers on application crashes and feeds into Bugzilla. On 
the plus side, they have a ton of bug reports now, and a good statistics 
on problems with all the packages in active use. On the minus side, they 
have a ton of bug reports :)

The problem with automatic reporting is that people don't bother to fill 
details that aren't available the tool, like 'what did you do before it 
crashed', data and code used, etc. Such folks aren't very likely to 
bother to submit the bug manually, though, so it probably is a net 
advantage for auto systems.

Some thought needs to be given to privacy concerns: how do we handle
people who might have proprietary data or code? I think it would be
OK to simply provide a method to turn bug reporting off.

It is possible to have too many bug reports that overwhelm the 
developers; Fedora has a triage system where people look at bugs and 
classify them (weed out duplicates, etc). I am not sure if this is
worth worrying about beforehand, or just solving the problem if it
appears.

Regarding the difficulty of keeping up with Savannah, Octave could
either make a best effort to deal with the interface _and_ provide
instructions and data how to do it manually. Alternatively, we could
have a stable bug report format that is being sent to bugs.octave.org
which then turns around and submits it according to the current fashion.
I just saw that Rik suggested the same thing as I was typing mine.