[Incubator] seang on "How Rigorous is OSGeo Software Incubation?"

[Uli Rothstein]

Dear Incubator Committee,

first we (the mapbender dev-team) definitively agree that a bug tracker is 
essential for a project and consider that the discussion during the incubation 
process about those lacks of a project is the crucial factor hardening projects.
Thanks for your encouragement.
We've activated the bug tracker on sourceforge in 2003 
(http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=88554&atid=587112). But this tracker 
never worked according to our wishes. There are different reasons: the 
developers, the users, the tracker.
So in most cases the bugs were managed in the mailinglists and the wiki 
(http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/Bugs), however the tracker was available all 
the time.
They (lists and wiki) are definitively no standard bug trackers, but they are 
"open" systems and it was not our intention to close off transparency and make 
new people to outsiders. We had simply to provide an easy-to-use management for 
bugs, because the bug tracker on sf.net was not accepted by the different 
participants.

Knowing that we've to close this gap of a standard bug tracker that works, we've 
called a mapbender irc (with Frank Warmerdam and Arnulf Christl from the 
Incubator Committee).
So we come to the following decisions:
- The bug tracker on sf.net will be revived until a new tracker is found.
- If there is a solution for different osgeo-project, the mapbender project will 
migrate directly.
- the mapbender-team hopes, that there will be a practicable solution, as Chris 
Holmes remarked: "I'll try to find some time to work on getting jira licenses 
for OSGeo and putting them on a test box" and "With GeoTools we never used our 
sourceforge bug tracker, but when we got JIRA going on codeahaus the tracker was 
suddenly a big win."
- all reported bugs from the lists and the wiki should be migrated to the sf.net 
bug tracker

Until this time we make efforts to invite all developers and users to revive the 
existing bug tracker.

Sorry for not reporting this earlier.
Best regards
Uli Rothstein


-- 
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        Ulrich Rothstein
          CCGIS GbR
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         53121 Bonn
           GERMANY
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   uli.rothstein at ccgis.de
        www.ccgis.de
    www.mapbender.org
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