GRUB 2 development

GRUB 2 development

[Marco Gerards]

Hi,

As you all might have noticed, I have been spamming this list like
crazy the last two days :-)

The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
and people sending in patches/bugreports.

Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
anymore.

If we have a bug tracker, bugs and patches won't be forgotted until we
actively close them.  This will fix a serious problem in GRUB
development.  At the moment I am a bit more active.  But I can not
promise if I can keep being this active...

Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
Perhaps someone else knows something better.

I would even prefer using savannah than the current situation.  I hope
we can figure out a solution real soon.  How about just using savannah
and add a GRUB2 option there, unless someone comes up with something
better in a few days/weeks?

--
Marco

Re: GRUB 2 development

[Vesa Jääskeläinen]

Marco Gerards wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As you all might have noticed, I have been spamming this list like
> crazy the last two days :-)
> 
> The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
> outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
> and people sending in patches/bugreports.
> 
> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
> anymore.
> 
> If we have a bug tracker, bugs and patches won't be forgotted until we
> actively close them.  This will fix a serious problem in GRUB
> development.  At the moment I am a bit more active.  But I can not
> promise if I can keep being this active...
> 
> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
> Perhaps someone else knows something better.
> 
> I would even prefer using savannah than the current situation.  I hope
> we can figure out a solution real soon.  How about just using savannah
> and add a GRUB2 option there, unless someone comes up with something
> better in a few days/weeks?

I agree on this one. This has been a problem for a long time. And I
think we have had several discussions about this, so far no solution
however.

Problem with savannah is that it really doesn't handle different
releases nicely. And it does not handle patches nicely at all. Bugzilla
is much better on this approach. Though it is huge software to maintain
and needs a server. If we can find maintainer and the server with
necessary bandwidth (which should be small-to-moderate).

Oh... did I mention that bugzilla can be nicely combined with Mylyn :) ?
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/

Re: GRUB 2 development

[Jordi Mallach]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 06:53:51PM +0100, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
> anymore.
> 
> If we have a bug tracker, bugs and patches won't be forgotted until we
> actively close them.  This will fix a serious problem in GRUB
> development.  At the moment I am a bit more active.  But I can not
> promise if I can keep being this active...
> 
> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
> Perhaps someone else knows something better.

Have you considered using Trac? It's way lighter than bugzilla, and
offers a few other simple features that could ease this project's
management. Finding a place to host trac.enbug.org or whatever domain
would be trivial.

http://trac.edgewall.org/

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi@sindominio.net     jordi@debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/

Re: GRUB 2 development

[Robert Millan]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 06:53:51PM +0100, Marco Gerards wrote:
> 
> The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
> outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
> and people sending in patches/bugreports.
> 
> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
> anymore.
> 
> If we have a bug tracker, bugs and patches won't be forgotted until we
> actively close them.  This will fix a serious problem in GRUB
> development.  At the moment I am a bit more active.  But I can not
> promise if I can keep being this active...
> 
> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
> Perhaps someone else knows something better.
> 
> I would even prefer using savannah than the current situation.  I hope
> we can figure out a solution real soon.  How about just using savannah
> and add a GRUB2 option there, unless someone comes up with something
> better in a few days/weeks?

We had this discussion before.  See:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-06/msg00208.html

And:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-07/msg00086.html
  (funny that we all forget things so easily ;-))

I think Okuji makes valid points.  How about using the tracker in savannah?

It's certainly better than using the mailing list as a bug tracker ;-)

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)

Re: GRUB 2 development

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Saturday 10 November 2007 18:53, Marco Gerards wrote:
> The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
> outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
> and people sending in patches/bugreports.

Ah, really. For me, it is not "accidentally" but "naturally". ;)

> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
> anymore.

Hmm... I don't agree completely with this argument in my experience. When the 
aim is to track issues, email or wiki does not work so well (unless you use a 
kind of plugin to the wiki to make wiki a bug tracker). But for discussions, 
email or irc is much better. A bug tracker could work as well as email, if it 
supports email integration (which I tried with BugCommunicator, and failed 
due to many inconsistencies among email client implementations).

So, in reality, I used a bug tracker only for recording purpose. Bugs are 
registered, then discussions are done in email. Once something is determined 
(fixed, cancelled or whatever), the bug tracker is updated.

After then, I realized that a wiki was good enough for recording. I felt that 
it was easier to access and update info on a wiki than on a bug tracker.

Besides that, maybe as I said before, the real problem is noise. For GRUB 
Legacy, I mostly used email. When a message looked important, and I didn't 
have time to deal with it immediately, I marked the message as "important" so 
that I could look up for such messages later (a feature implemented by any 
modern MUA). If a message was just bogus, I just skipped it over.

Once I started to use the bug tracker on Savannah, of course, people started 
to post bugs there. Then, all messages were "important", because they were 
registered in the database. A lot of my time was consumed to deal with silly 
posts, such as just "GRUB does not work, help me!". So, instead of marking 
important messages, I had to mark non-important messages.

So did it make my life any easier to have a bug tracker? I hardly believe it. 
Therefore, these days, my usage of bug/issue trackers is to limit people who 
can post bugs to known people. This way, I can make my email-based-hand-made 
tracker a bit more structured and sharable with other people, yet not having 
noise very much.

Surely, this way also has a disadvantage that somebody else must submit a bug 
to a tracker every time when an important issue is raised by an unknown 
person. The question is, after all, whether bad messages should be deleted or 
good messages should be added... Personally, I think it is rather a rare 
event that an unknown person makes a good report, in comparison with from a 
known person, especially when taking it into account that a good reporter 
tends to become a repeater, thus become a known person quickly.

So I don't object to having a bug trakcer, but I recommend you considering 
carefully whether you want to encourage everybody to submit bugs to a bug 
tracker.

> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
> Perhaps someone else knows something better.

No, the current trend is trac or a trac-like system, such as redMine. :)

Okuji

Re: GRUB 2 development

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@gnu.org> writes:

> On Saturday 10 November 2007 18:53, Marco Gerards wrote:
>> The problem currently is that, accidently, we lose track of
>> outstanding bugs and patches.  It is frustrating to both developers
>> and people sending in patches/bugreports.
>
> Ah, really. For me, it is not "accidentally" but "naturally". ;)

:-)

>> Hopefully we can start using a bug tracker soon.  There are many that
>> are good.  In my opinion the mailinglist and wiki doesn't work for us
>> anymore.
>
> Hmm... I don't agree completely with this argument in my experience. When the 
> aim is to track issues, email or wiki does not work so well (unless you use a 
> kind of plugin to the wiki to make wiki a bug tracker). But for discussions, 
> email or irc is much better. A bug tracker could work as well as email, if it 
> supports email integration (which I tried with BugCommunicator, and failed 
> due to many inconsistencies among email client implementations).

My goal is to track issues.  Perhaps I was not clear, but I really
like IRC and especially email for discussions.

> So, in reality, I used a bug tracker only for recording purpose. Bugs are 
> registered, then discussions are done in email. Once something is determined 
> (fixed, cancelled or whatever), the bug tracker is updated.
>
> After then, I realized that a wiki was good enough for recording. I felt that 
> it was easier to access and update info on a wiki than on a bug tracker.

It just doesn't work out...  Besides that, bug tracking systems are
better when you are working on something with a group of people.

> Besides that, maybe as I said before, the real problem is noise. For GRUB 
> Legacy, I mostly used email. When a message looked important, and I didn't 
> have time to deal with it immediately, I marked the message as "important" so 
> that I could look up for such messages later (a feature implemented by any 
> modern MUA). If a message was just bogus, I just skipped it over.
>
> Once I started to use the bug tracker on Savannah, of course, people started 
> to post bugs there. Then, all messages were "important", because they were 
> registered in the database. A lot of my time was consumed to deal with silly 
> posts, such as just "GRUB does not work, help me!". So, instead of marking 
> important messages, I had to mark non-important messages.

Other people can't see how we mark messages in our inbox.  That's the
problem...

> So did it make my life any easier to have a bug tracker? I hardly believe it. 
> Therefore, these days, my usage of bug/issue trackers is to limit people who 
> can post bugs to known people. This way, I can make my email-based-hand-made 
> tracker a bit more structured and sharable with other people, yet not having 
> noise very much.
>
> Surely, this way also has a disadvantage that somebody else must submit a bug 
> to a tracker every time when an important issue is raised by an unknown 
> person. The question is, after all, whether bad messages should be deleted or 
> good messages should be added... Personally, I think it is rather a rare 
> event that an unknown person makes a good report, in comparison with from a 
> known person, especially when taking it into account that a good reporter 
> tends to become a repeater, thus become a known person quickly.
>
> So I don't object to having a bug trakcer, but I recommend you considering 
> carefully whether you want to encourage everybody to submit bugs to a bug 
> tracker.

We could ask people to send an email and after that put the bug on the
bugtracker?  If people submit reports that cannot be understand, we
simply have to remove the report I think, otherwise it becomes noisy.

>> Many projects use bugzilla.  Perhaps it isn't perfect, but it does
>> what I want.  I just do not have the resources to set that up.
>> Perhaps someone else knows something better.
>
> No, the current trend is trac or a trac-like system, such as redMine. :)

Ah :)

So can we use savannah?  And for what shall we use it?  Bugs, patches,
todo items?  If it doesn't work out, we can switch or stop using it.
But as I see it now, we need such tool for good collaboration.

--
Marco