Josh Berkus wrote:
Tom,
Possibly workable, but what's your definition of "registered user"?
Signing up via a webform, getting an e-mailed password back, logging in.
I'd hope that anyone subscribed to any of the mailing lists would be
considered registered, for instance. Not sure if we can do that with
either BZ or GForge; anyone know?
Usually it works the other way around; people can't subscribe until they've registered via web.
I believe it should not be hard to do a one-time bulk registration of everyone on the lists, if that was desired.
Stepping back a bit and gathering a few threads.
BZ versions etc. There is finally some movement in the mainline BZ code to get DB independence into it - and the first DB to benefit will be Postgres. Dave Lawrence at RedHat appears to be working again on landing this (after a long hiatus). See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98304 and http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146679 . The reason I would prefer to go with mainline BZ (assuming we go with BZ at all) is that my past experience of upgrading BZ has not been pleasant, and I am sure it would be even harder doing it from a fork like the RedHat one.
Signal to Noise. It's not at all clear to me why a bug tracking system should have a worse signal to noise ratio than a mailing list with similar access rules, especially since we also provide the facility to log bugs through a web form directly off the postgresql.org home page. But even if it does, that can be managed by good triage. That should improve the ratio for all but those doing the triage. Personally, I'd be surprised if it took one knowledgable person more than 30 minutes a day to weed out the garbage (sorry for the mixed metaphor), and if the load was spread across several people it would be just a few minutes a day for any one of them, at a significant saving to everyone else.
Email interface: it should not be beyond the wit of man to provide some level of email interface to any reasonable bug tracking system. Whether or not it is worth doing depends on the demand. Two obvious places for it would be 1) to allow initial logging of a bug via email, and 2) periodically run query 'foo' and email me the results. Getting a once a day digest of new bug reports might be quite nice in fact.
One size fits all: I understood that this discussion arose in the context of a suggestion to migrate GBorg to a GForge base (a proposal I generally support). What is right for the core project might well not be right for GBorg projects. Perhaps a conservative approach might be to try things out on GBorg/GForge and see how things go, without touching how the core operates for now.
cheers
andrew
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