[Geany] Ideas for reducing duplicate bug reports

Russell Dickenson russelldickenson at xxxxx
Fri Feb 3 01:36:19 UTC 2012


On 3 February 2012 11:12, Lex Trotman <elextr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
>> On 02/01/2012 04:32 PM, Nate Bargmann wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm a co-adniminstrator of a SourceForge host project and agree
>>> completely about the bug system, or tracker as they call it.  We
>>> encourage bug reports to be sent to our mailing list, however, that
>>> requires the reporter join the list or one of us has to approve the
>>> message upon moderation and then remember to CC the reporter unless we
>>> get a mail that the reporter joined the list.
>>>
>>
>> -1 to mailing list reporting for the reasons you mentioned, at least not for
>> *all* bugs.
>
> Mailing list for all bugs just adds unnecessary clerical effort on the
> Geany team.
>
>>
>>
>>> I don't have an answer but would steal any good ideas.  :-)  Is there a
>>> BTS that is easy to use?  Debian's system is mostly done via email, at
>>> least that has been the extent of my involvement with it as a reporter
>>> and on followups.  Bugzilla is used by various projects and I find it to
>>> be so-so.  Trac is another.
>>>
>>
>> Having used Bugzilla only as a user, I can say it's easily as bad as Source
>> Forge if not worse. I've seen Trac but never used it.
>>
>
> Used  Trac a few times, it seems much the same. ie bad
>
>>
>>> Perhaps the most difficult thing is using the search properly.  What I
>>> had happen recently was to search the Debian BTS for some key words on
>>> an issue I was having.  Almost immediately the maintainer merged my
>>> report with an older one that described the same problem but used
>>> different terminology.  Of course the maintainer recognized the
>>> similarity and acted on it.  Does the SF.net tracker allow merging of
>>> reports?  I've not checked as it's not something I've had to try and do
>>> as we get so few reports in the SF.net tracker.
>>>
>>
>> Agree about searching. Two users experiencing the same issue usually have a
>> completely different description, and so searching is often quite hard.
>>
>> I don't think SF.net does allow merging dupes, and this partially the reason
>> I started this thread, because duplicate tracking is stupid on Source Forge
>> (unless I just don't know how to use it).
>>
>
> On most of them AFAICT
>
>> In a perfect world, each report that was marked as a dupe would contribute
>> to keywords for the whole bug
>
> Thats a good idea, now how do we get it implemented?
>
> and before the user submits a new report, it
>> would search all the items and duplicates and suggest that the user checks a
>> handful of similar reports before/during submitting to see if they are
>> duplicates.
>
> Thats more likely to be annoying rather than useful
>
> The issue with a bug tracker is only what software to run, but who to
> host it.  Nobody I know of allows you to run your own tracker
> software, each free host has its own.
>
> Cheers
> Lex
>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Matthew Brush

You might consider JIRA, a commercial product of Atlassian. Of course
Geany is an open source project and may prefer not to be tied in any
way to a company. Atlassian provide hosted instances of JIRA for open
source projects, including JBoss. I use it almost daily in my work and
find it's a very capable product.

The Frugalware Linux distribution recently changed from using Flyspray
to Trac because Flyspray was no longer maintained. Trac seems OK to me
as an end user of the product.

Mantis - http://www.mantisbt.org/ - looks good and is seemingly
actively developed. According to the blog, it has a phone-optimized
interface available which could be a big advantage. The development
team could keep their phones by their beds and track bugs as they are
reported and respond instantly and easily. :P


Regards,

Russell Dickenson



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