Re: [Gnu-arch-users] how about a game?

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Tom>             arch-bugs--lord--0.1 ^
    Tom>                    |
    Tom>                    v arch-bugs--masters--0.1 <->
    Tom> arch-bugs--sally--0.1 ^
    Tom>                    |
    Tom>                    v arch-bugs--joe--0.1

    Tom>    Mostly it will be up to the bug master to make changes to
    Tom> the tree but gatekeepers and coders can make changes that the
    Tom> bug masters merge in.


[...]

    Tom> ** Bug Queue

    Tom>   It is up to the bug masters, in consultation with the user
    Tom> community and the players, to schedule bug fixes.

    Tom>   Mechanically, they do this by moving the bug from
    Tom> "incoming" to "queue".  Files in "queue" get a numeric prefix
    Tom> -- assigned in the order in which bugs arrive.

I have read your proposal, and it mostly seems good to me.

However, I am still not clear on one issue (I apologise if I just
missed the explanation).

How do you reference bug reports? eg. in an E-Mail you might want to
tell somebody "this problem has been fixed in bug xxx. This email may
be indefinitely archived and searchable, so ideally the reference
needs to be valid.

Do you use the "name" or the "number"? I get the impression that the
name is used?

If you reference the name, then what happens if this needs to be
changed? Often bugs on the Debian BTS for instance aren't what they
first appear to be, so there is a retitle command for this purpose.
If you reference to a bug by its name though, and the name changes,
then all past references will become invalid.

If you use the number, how do you ensure that all bugs would be
assigned globally unique numbers? A distributed system such as arch
could potentially allow bugs to be entered by different people
simultaneously.

Could the arch-id be used to reference bug reports? After all, it
already is guaranteed to be globally unique, and arch will enforce
this, at least to a certain degree.

Only potential problem, is arch-ids are rather long. You could use
another algorithm to make it shorter...

Just my random thoughts.
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>