Bug tracker: next steps

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Executive summary: If, as comments suggest, people would rather work
on bug threads and other current dev/review stuff through an ITS,
great, let's do it.

But regarding the reasons advertised in this thread, it's not going to
help with archived bugs for years, and it's not likely to help folks
like Hans much because I think it's going to be file and forget for
most issues, unless we have a volunteer who bugs developers to work on
stuff.

Adrian Aichner writes:

 > I'll do both to some extent.

Yeah, well, this "some extent" stuff is where I see a problem.  Those
folks who have worked with commercial BTSes (eg, Red Hat or SuSE
Novell) are working with systems with both professional sysadmins and
assigned responsibilities for issue categories.  Of the volunteer
systems I've worked with on a reasonably frequent basis (Debian,
Gentoo, DarwinPorts/MacPorts, Python, Mailman), Python is the only one
I continue to report bugs to unless I know a maintainer personally,
because they're basically just black holes.  And guess what?  Python
has volunteers who not only summarize the status of the issue tracker,
both statistically and brief summaries of recent changes, but also a
monthly (more like quarterly recently) thread summary of the dev lists.

 > >> rather do that than periodically browse through 3-year-old e-mails.
 > >
 > > Amen, brother.  :-)

Sure, me too.  But we don't have a volunteer to input the -beta
archives, so for the next three years you're going to periodically be
browsing through three-year-old emails to get that information.  Sure,
it will ramp up over time, but for the first year of operation, at
least, the ITS is not going to be a primary source of archived issue
information.

And as you may recall, about 5 weeks ago the only person Aidan
mentioned as regularly reviewing patches (which should go through the
issue tracker too) and who also takes on the burden of answering -beta
posts that go unanswered for more than a few days resigned from those
responsibilities.  The rest of you guys do your thing, you do it well,
the product is good for what it is, but I don't see good vibes for the
users coming out of this, including the mega-users like Hans and Mike
Fabian who represent many thousands of distro users.  Anything in this
area that's good for developers is good for users, definitely.  But
most likely the users are going to have mixed feelings about the ITS,
at best, if we spin it as a way to get dev attention.