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Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 21:55:15 -0500
From: sl@stanleylieber.com
To: 9front@9front.org
Subject: Re: [9front] PROPOSAL: New 9front Bug Tracker
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>> The existing bug tracker sucks.
> 
> It would be helpful to know the, say, three most hated things about the 
> current regime :-)  Knowing what you're running from can help guide where 
> you should be running to.

When 9front started it was hosted at Google Code because they offered
mercurial and we needed a reliable place to host code.  Google Code
came with a free bug tracker, so people used it.

When Google Code went away we lost that.  Eventually cinap complained
that we no longer had a bug tracker.  After some discussion we settled
on the following design:

	A bug is a directory named for a brief description of the bug
	that contains a file readme which includes the original bug
	report plus whatever comments were later added by 9front
	developers.  The bug's status is defined by its location
	within one of two directories: open/ or closed/.

This worked okay, but in practice most of the bugs never had any
commentary added to them.  Bugs might not even get closed after the
fix was committed.  Bascially, I was the only one managing the bug
reporting system.  Most of it manually.

At some point we started forwarding bug reports to a separate
9front-bugs mailing list.

At some point we engineereed a web interface.

Most of these add-ons were implemented in an incomplete, or otherwise
unsatisfactory fashion.  Nobody likes the web interface.  There is a
lot of confusion amongst users as to how to file a bug, how to reply
to a bug report, where to discuss the bug once it has been filed, how
to figure out what is going on.  People were replying directly to the
9front-bugs list, which was never intended (the capability to do so
was an oversight on my part).  People were sending updates to
9front-bugs-open, which created a new, separate bug for every mail
message sent to it.

My proposal aims to address all these problems.

For our purposes, there are two main purposes for the bug tracker,
without which there is no reason for it to exist:

	1.  Create a succinct summary and central repository of bug
	information for cinap and other developers to glance at.

	2.  Avoid duplication of random bug reports and duplication of
	work.

If we don't fulfill these then we're wasting our time.

sl