Re: killing the graphics list

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Jun-2007, Paul Kienzle wrote:

| An issue tracker with a mail gateway would be better.  Anyone know of a 
| good one?

There seem to be a lot of bug/issue/problem tracking things, but I'm
not sure any of them do exactly what we want.  I thought I might be
able to easily hook Request Tracker (RT) in to the mailing lists since
the people who run the systems that run the mailing lists now also use
RT for their support desk.  But when I asked, they said that it was
not yet possible to have multiple independent RT installations on
their system (I don't know the details, or whether this is still true,
but it has not been that long since I asked).

In any case, my requirements for bug tracking software are simply

  Ability to interact by email.  I could deal with deleting or
  refiling reports via a web interface, but I don't want to be forced
  to use a browser text box to edit or reply to bug reports.

  Web interface that can show the current status of bug reports (or
  patches).  People should be able to see what bugs are open, fixed,
  marked as "won't fix", assigned to someone, or whatever.

  Freely available source for the bug tracker, and at least somewhat
  easy to install and configure.

I really don't think we need much other than this at the moment.
Having something that meets the second requirement above would really
help.  That way, people could sign up to fix problems.  I would then
assign myself to fix a bug before starting to work on a bug fix, for
example.  Then we could maybe minimize the race condition we now have.
Also, if a bug report is not picked up by someone, it will be clear to
others that unless someone claims the report, it will remain unfixed.
As it is, my perception is that people expect that all bug reports are
eventually my reponsibility, and at this point, there is no way that I
can fix all problems reported.  Partly this is because of time
constraints, and partly it is because I am simply not an expert in all
of the areas that are covered by Octave.

jwe