[GRASS5] Dealing with old bug reports: new GRASS 6 bugtracker?

[Markus Neteler]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 12:25:38PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> Hi Markus,
> 
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 06:37:20AM +0200, Markus Neteler wrote:
> > (CC Bernhard)
> > 
> > On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 12:27:06PM -0400, Helena Mitasova wrote:
> 
> > To clarify: I meant bugs where the developers say that it is resolved and
> > the users do not confirm.
> 
> in my view, those should be closed after a reasonable amount of time.
> 
> > > >>In summary: The 452 bug reports do NOT reflect the current that of
> > > >>GRASS 6. It's simply misleading. 
> 
> If a user is still on GRASS5 (and usually there is a reason for this)
> then this bug still affects GRASS6 in some way.

Not necessarily. If things are rewritten, the bug report does often
no longer apply (see my "this works in 6.x" or "please try in 6.x"
comments in some of the RT reports).

> A bug database also does not need to be representative,
> Debian and KDE always have thousands of bugs open.
> It is a tool and database mainly for helper and developers.

Exactly. And a rather crowded bugtracker doesn't help too much
for such a small developers group if things cannot be visually
separated. Therefore my suggestion to split.

> > > >>Other suggestion: We set up a separate bugtracker for GRASS 6.
> > > 
> > > Please do that - I spent two days trying to help clean bugtracker
> > > just recently and it was indeed a frustrating experience.
> 
> I would be interesting why it was frustrating technically,
> because it seems always a bit frustrating when we do not have enough
> people helping with the tracker.

For me it's frustrating since the list is endless and I see a lot
of stuff which will apparently never be closed since it was resolved
in a later version.

> Technically, if you set up a filter for grass6 bugs, then you are
> not seeing the others.

How to do this? Doesn't this require an "Area" filter which is
not there? Wish: I would like to see "grass6" only.

> > > Setting up separate bugtracker for GRASS6 should solve half of the 
> > > problems 
> 
> Can you explain what problems will be solved?

Because a bugtracker should look sort of "inviting" to people to
help. If I see 450 bugs in a long page, I get tired immediately and
go elsewhere :-)

> > > and if Maciek does a good job in sorting out the real bugs
> > > from complaints and users problems and tracing the status of important 
> > > bugs with people who have
> > > the expertise to fix them we should be in a pretty good shape.
> 
> > @Bernhard: what do you think, is there a possibility to 
> > split RT?
> 
> It is work, but of course it is possible.
> I would not really recommend it and I still want to propose a new
> infrastructure for GRASS based on gforge at some day (no schedule yet,
> but we have a lot of it running already).

Do you mean this one: http://gforge.org/ ?

> This would allow for a better integration of several trackers.
> Another option would be to move to roundup.

 http://roundup.sourceforge.net/

I feel that in the past most of the bugs were solved via mailing
list...


Markus