On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 06:59:13PM +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: > On 6/10/07, Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > FWIW I've begun to work on this (for real). I've called the tool > >"grit". You can follow the developpement on: > > > > * gitweb: http://git.madism.org/?p=grit.git;a=summary > > * git: git://git.madism.org/grit.git/ > > Call me a fool, but writing a <new> bugtracker looks like a > boil-the-oceans scheme. Sure, what if I like it anyway ? > Adding git & gitweb support to traq, bugzilla, mantis, gforge, etc is > what is going to make the difference. Most of those have already the > ability to "link" to one or more commits -- after the commits are done > and in GIT. Sure, you can do that and still inherit from the many downsides of those tools: central, needs another separate tool to work with, and a tool that nowadays tends to eat 500Mb of your memory if you take the most hype implementation of it (Yes I'm describing a web browser), that is slow like hell (because yes, there is many clients at the same time on the central server, that is overloaded like hell), and so on. You can like central web UIs, your choice. And I suppose if grit works well, there will be one at some point. > So you can tell your bugtracker > - which commit fixed it -- usually auto-linked if you include the > bugnumber in the commit message > - which commit added the test -- auto linked as above > - which commit introduced the bug -- if such thing exists and someone > digs it up yeah, that is what bugtrackers already do. Though, that's of no use for release managers. What is useful is what people call "milestones" in trac e.g., meaning a set of bugs that has been flagged as needing to be fixed. And what a release manager need is a tool to deal with this set of bugs as a whole. That's the same argument that Linus has against per-file tracking. Also atm when you e.g. backport a patch that fixes this or this bug, you're no BTS helps you tagging the bug as fixed in that branch as well. Not to mention that BTS I know do not make any use of the commits DAG. And for a very good reason, there is no real DAG in many existing tools (svn, cvs, ...). > If the bugtracker can also auto-link things that look committish in > text entered by users (someone might write "bisect sez that f345e is > to blame"), with tooltips indicating in which heads those commits > resides (like gitk does), then it's just gorgeous. that's not up to the BTS tool to do that, it's way to high level. It's up to the importing filters/hooks that will parse the associated ML, and that would translate that to useful low level BTS commands. > And definitely, if you use git as an alibi to write a new bugtracker, > don't use the "works only with git" as a feature. It should work with > as many SCMs as possible. No it should not, because it can't. I want the distributed and Bug status spanning-DAGS be a central feature. So that means that this tool can only work on top of SCMs that support that. ttbomk git, hg, _maybe_ bzr fit the description. I only know the former, but I really plan to write the tool in a way that the underlying SCM does not matters _too_ much. Maybe I'll fail. Honestly, I don't really care (yet ?). > OTOH, that's just me, I'm lazy and like to work on already-successful > projects that are 99% there for my needs (and where I can add that > 1%). You're a lucky guy. All bug trackers I've used suck a way or another, that impedes my workflow a lot. Let's cite a couple: * bugzilla: takes more from the -zilla than from the BTS side. It's huge, monstruous, slow (have ever used glibc's bugzilla ? it has maybe 5k bugs, it's slow like if it ran on an Atari ST), complex, the mail gateway suck hard, it's completely unusable for me. Believe me, I've packaged KDE for 2 years in Debian, now am in the glibc team. Every single day I have to work on this horrible tool is a PITA. * flyspray: I've been upstream for a short time. Visually nice, good to work with, UI is great. Integration totally suck, worthless. Can't use mails either, needs a Web Browser -> useless. The same holds for mantis, roundup and a lot of other friends. * debbugs: oh yeah there is a mail interface. So slow that you have to wait up to 15 minutes to see your command be taken into account. And when you have to deal with dozens of bugs (Yes I've done that on a regular basis) you _have_ sometimes to wait for the answer to come back (because you need an ID that will be in there e.g.) to continue your work. That is unacceptable, you pass most of your time waiting. Moreover sometimes you made an error in your commands, so you also need to parse the anwer ... one day later because "immediateley when you still remembered what this was about" is not an option. Unacceptable again. The plus: it uses mboxes, hence is worthwile in a hacking environment, it fits the workflow well. * trac: very very very nice tool. I mean it. We use it at work, where I have to suffer svn (through git-svn though). It's really nice (did I repeat myself ?). THough, it's on top of svn, and you can't use the Bugs informations from your repository. You can't say: I'm backporting that patch into that branch. Now what affects this branch please ? Trac can't answer that (and ttbomk now BTS really can anyway, except Debian's debbugs instance, and it's somehow limited). That is a question a release manager takes 80% of his time to ask. I hope grit can take back to the 0.01% of his time, which is still too much. On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 08:55:21PM +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: > On 6/10/07, Jan Hudec <bulb@xxxxxx> wrote: > >I don't know about any *distributed* bug tracker, which is the point > >here. > > As an end user, I suspect I _don't_ want to have to report a bug in a > distributed bug tracker ;-) I trol^Wdiscuss everyday on debian's channel with friends that tell that svn is the best tool ever, and that they would never ever use a distributed SCM because it's too hard to understand. Your call. > > We have several distributed version control tools, but no other > > distributed tools for the other tasks in configuration management. > > Bugtrackers are co-owned by developers, users and (where they exist) > project managers. That's exactly why distributed rock. Because everyone could _really_ own _his_ bugtracker. This solves the same range of ACLish issues git solves with respect to the code. > > - Distributed version control is designed to decrease the workload of > > the central maintainer(s) while keeping him in control. But with > > centralized > > And to provide a single place for users to report a problem and track > its status. Why wouldn't it exist a "public reporting interface"-branch ? that would be the same purpose as the mainline ~linus/linux2.6.git tree. And you can build/instanciate your beloved web UI on top of that, and people would just have to pull from there. What a shock, it's easy ! > > If it uses git as it's database, which it probably will, > > Well - hmmm. Git's database is great at tracking _content identity_. > But a bug's content identity (description+comments+status) changes all > the time. I don't think it's naturally a good match. Oh, because the code never changes. Doh, how stupid I am :) No, really, you name your bug after the sha hash of the first report, I think that's pretty obvious. That gives you a bug name. Then you ask git for "what's the current sha for this bug in the tip of the BTS branch", then you ask "so now what this new sha is pointing to in the code". That's a small indirection that I suppose is bearable. > > Yes. But for many people current bug tracking tools do NOT work 99%. > > Hmmm. I agree in that "does not work disconnected" is a big issue with > web tools, but debbugs works disconnected, and is good. Git's > bugtracker (git@vger) works disconnected too ;-) And googlegears might > help the rest of us. Is there any other problem with current BTs? It's not integrated with the workflow. And sorry, but git@vger (or workse lkml@vger).. it does not work. Maybe for git it does because the flow is still human manageable, and that it seems junio has enough time for it. But for the kernel ? please. You should read Bastian Blank frustration about regressions and nobody tracking them. Know why ? because there is no tool that is well known and well integrated in the workflow. There is a long rant against kernel.org's bugzilla, you should read it as well. It's not really instructive (at least there wasn't anything new for me in it, I was already bought to many arguments in there). But you'll see the world isn't as rosa-lila you think it is. On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 08:38:03PM +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: > On 6/10/07, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > After looking at the above existing alternatives, some brave soul > > might decide and say, "Hey, I can write something better in 2 weeks" > > ;-). I'm sure I could come up with something really better in say a month... If I hadn't paid work to do too :) > And "it's closely integrated with git" can actually be a misfeature. > Cool if it's what gets you going, but not enough for world domination > ;-) It's a misfeature for you because you read it as "non portable". That's a fair point. And like said, it may be extended to SCM's with the same set of features I need to build it. But let's be honnest, I don't care about a BTS that uses the smallest common set of features of SCM's. Reading this list, you should know it's almost a void set. No, I think a good BTS should make an excellent use of high level features of the SCM. The real problem is, there is maybe 2 or 3 SCMs that have this set of strong and good features. Too bad for the other, I can't work with them, they suck hard, and I don't see why I should support bad practices anyways. (Yes I'm also a guy with strong opinions too, it's not really restricted to Linus ;p) > I agree it's useful, but I don't think it has any benefit having it in > the SCM _at all_. Having them in the BT is a lot more flexible -- and > the fact that git has stable commit IDs makes it easier to integrate > in a BT; as the BT can spot that the commit fixing bug 123 is now > merged into head ZZ as well as head YYY. If you do that you loose: * fastness, and I don't want to work with debbugs anymore. * distribution: Meaning that for _one_ project everybody needs to use this central bugtracker. Whereas .oO(kernel) there is some projects where the subcomponents are dealt with from very different teams, very different way to release things, and they are interested with their bugs, and their bugs only. They would prefer a very fast interface to deal with their 1k bugs, and not worry about the 100k the rest of the project has. Branching bugs also makes sense you know ? > Now, to rule the world, BTs gain a lot more from being able to > integrate with different SCMs, You are the one saying it. I beg to differ. > automated test systems (like tinderbox), MTAs (debbugs), wikis (traq), > stats tracking for PHBs (bugzilla), etc. So loose coupling wins here, > and git's SHA1s are great for that. IMHO a BTS is a _low_ level tool. that's the road git took, I sometimes describe the plumbing git commands as the "Assembler" of the SCM world to friends when I talk to them about git. That's really the best way to implement a thing: have a small small set of rock solid, well designed tools, and build the others as porcelains with them. Testing is a high level tool. I don't need to support them, I need to have exactly the low level querying rocket-fast query interfaces so that integration scripts are at most 100 lines long. > And at git's end we can get the smooth integration using/abusing that > loose coupling strategy. So if git-log/gitk/qgit grow some hooks that > can be used to perform a lookup... I can think of a perl script that > gets events for each SHA1 that git-rev-list produces and returns one > bug number, url and title (or more than one) that then git-log / gitk > / qgit / annotate can use to further "decorate" the commit info in a > similar style to what gitk is doing now with head names in each > commit. > > Would that fit your vision of a nicely integrated tracker? Honestly ? No, because that would be horribly slow (but I'd love to be proven wrong). Cheers, -- ·O· Pierre Habouzit ··O madcoder@xxxxxxxxxx OOO http://www.madism.org
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