Re: Bug tracker for Octave Forge

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Jun-2010, Rik wrote:

| Ben Abbott wrote:
| > On Jun 9, 2010, at 5:24 PM, Rik wrote:
| > 
| >> 6/9/10
| >>
| >> How do we want to handle bugs related to Octave Forge on the savannah bug
| >> tracker?  At least two bugs have now been posted to the site which are
| >> really concerned with Octave Forge packages and not with Octave itself.  We
| >> could simply close the bugs with a note to the reporter that this is not
| >> the right place to report these.  Or I suppose we could figure out a more
| >> gentle solution, although I personally don't have a lot of patience for
| >> porting bugs from one tracker to another.
| >>
| >> --Rik
| > 
| > Perhaps the bug-tracker could include a "octave-forge"  category?

The status field already includes "Octave Forge", so we can 

| Yes, if we want the savannah tracker to become a joint tracker for Octave
| and Octave-Forge.  I'm not sure, however, that we want to take on that role.

I don't want the Octave bug tracker to be the place to report bugs for
Octave Forge packages.  Those packages are not part of Octave and I
don't think we want to appear to be responsible for the bug reports
for them.

OTOH, people don't seem to understand when they are using a function
from a package vs. a function from Octave, so they will continue to
report bugs in package functions in the Octave tracker.  It would be
good to have a way to move those bugs to the appropriate place rather
than just telling people that they have done something wrong by
reporting the bug.  Unfortunately, I don't see a way to do that unless
we are using the same bug tracking system for both projects.  And even
then, if Octave and Octave Forge are separate projects on savannah,
the current savannah tracker does not seem to allow bugs to be moved
from one project to another.  Maybe that could be fixed, but is
savannah even the right place for Octave Forge?  Given the current
variety of licensing in Octave Forge and the fact that it is not a GNU
project, I think it would have to be hosted at savannah.nongnu.org.
It's not clear whether the gnu and non-gnu parts of savannah share the
same tracker.  Bug numbers appear to be assigned globally, but
searching by bug number seems to also be somehow limited within
packages.

jwe