Bug Reporting / Issue Tracking System ?

[Alex Burger]

Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> Much appreciated. I'm still not sure it's worth it though. Serious bugs
> are generally fixed rather quickly. Those that are debatable ("I think
> Nagios should work like this: ...") are often sent to nagios-devel@
> first anyways, so duplicating the discussion in the bugtracker would
> just be tedious work that no-one would do.
> 
> Feature-requests are usually gathered through the list too, and the
> ones deemed cool and fun to work on often get implemented the first
> rainy day ;-)

On a rainy day I would rather look at a list of feature requests in a 
tracker than try to sift through a mail list looking for things to do.

The same goes for bug fixes.  If there was a central repository of open 
bugs, there would probably be more people submitting patches and 
improvements.  Discussions can still take place on the mail lists, but 
patches could be added to the bug report instead of posting somewhere on 
the net or attaching to an email.

As long as there are multiple people that can update the trackers, then 
they shouldn't be too hard to manage.  Canned responses can be used such as:

  Thanks for the bug report!
  We've fixed the problem in the main development
  tree, so it should be fixed in the next
  release of Nagios.

I honestly can't imagine trying to use the mail lists to keep track of 
bug reports for projects such as Net-SNMP.  I don't know how many bugs 
are fixed a month for Nagios (if there was a tracker I could tell you), 
but as it gets larger I think it would be a good idea to start using the 
trackers.  If they end up being mostly empty while still getting 30,000 
downloads a month, then it will only make Nagios look more professional.

Alex


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