git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[jidanni]

I predict that git maintenance will have to adopt a bug tracker.

Just like many other packages that relied on just sending bugs and
patches to a mailing list, in the end ended up adding a bug tracker.

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Christian MICHON]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:07 PM,  <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> I predict that git maintenance will have to adopt a bug tracker.
>

will it snow tomorrow ? ;-)

-- 
Christian
--
http://detaolb.sourceforge.net/, a linux distribution for Qemu with Git inside !

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Nanako Shiraishi]

Quoting jidanni@jidanni.org:

> I predict that git maintenance will have to adopt a bug tracker.
>
> Just like many other packages that relied on just sending bugs and
> patches to a mailing list, in the end ended up adding a bug tracker.

Thanks for sharing your insight.

A more important thing is what you are going to do about it.

There are people in the project who track bugs and patches and they are doing an excellent job, but it's inevitable that the larger the project grows, the more bugs and patches sent to the mailing list. There is a real risk that some of them may get lost in the noise.

The project can use capable project secretaries, and these people may choose to use an issue tracking system to ease their job of keeping track of bugs and patches. "A bug tracker" is just a tool and you need to have real people behind it who are actively taking care of the system and looking at the issues. Are you volunteering to make a difference by becoming one of them, or are you merely adding useless noise to the list traffic to make it more likely for bugs and patches to be lost?

-- 
Nanako Shiraishi
http://ivory.ap.teacup.com/nanako3/

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Teemu Likonen]

On 2009-02-03 19:05 (+0900), Nanako Shiraishi wrote:

> Quoting jidanni@jidanni.org:
>
>> I predict that git maintenance will have to adopt a bug tracker. Just
>> like many other packages that relied on just sending bugs and patches
>> to a mailing list, in the end ended up adding a bug tracker.
>
> Thanks for sharing your insight.
>
> A more important thing is what you are going to do about it.

Maybe he would file a lot of bug reports. At least in Debian there are
about 1800 reports from jidanni@jidanni.org:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=jidanni@jidanni.org

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Teemu Likonen wrote:

> On 2009-02-03 19:05 (+0900), Nanako Shiraishi wrote:
> 
> > Quoting jidanni@jidanni.org:
> >
> >> I predict that git maintenance will have to adopt a bug tracker. Just
> >> like many other packages that relied on just sending bugs and patches
> >> to a mailing list, in the end ended up adding a bug tracker.
> >
> > Thanks for sharing your insight.
> >
> > A more important thing is what you are going to do about it.
> 
> Maybe he would file a lot of bug reports. At least in Debian there are
> about 1800 reports from jidanni@jidanni.org:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?submitter=jidanni@jidanni.org

Definitely too much time on his hands.

If I had that much time, I know exactly what projects I would tackle: 
there are good ideas on the GSoC page, and it is highly unlikely all of 
them will be taken/sponsored by GSoC.

Ciao,
Dscho

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[jidanni]

Anyway, I have this file
  -rw-r--r--  1   19561 2009-01-13 03:26 DietCherries17
where I have 17 tiny documentation patches that sent to
git@vger.kernel.org but nothing happened.
Perhaps I could send them to a volunteer who could see if any of them
are useful and then do something with them. Thanks.

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Johannes Gilger]

On 2009-02-04, jidanni@jidanni.org <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> Anyway, I have this file
>   -rw-r--r--  1   19561 2009-01-13 03:26 DietCherries17
> where I have 17 tiny documentation patches that sent to
> git@vger.kernel.org but nothing happened.

As I recall a lot of those things were replied to (at least for the 
first few patches) as being not quite right (or plain wrong). Once you 
even said "oh, if you could fix this for me before applying it". At some 
point the time it takes to review patches and to write a quick fix for 
the bugs/typos yourself stands in no relation whatsoever.

> Perhaps I could send them to a volunteer who could see if any of them
> are useful and then do something with them. Thanks.

Or you could make one big "typo-fix"-patch out of them and one 
"i-didnt-understand-the-manpage-there"-patch. Then these patches could 
be reviewed and you could revise them.

A second solution would be to tackle real problems, earn the respect of 
the maintainer and those close to him, have your patches merged and 
_then_ when you come up with nitpicks about documentation, those people 
would be sure of your abilities and would put more trust in you to not 
mess up when writing documentation.

About the bug-tracker-thing: I am quite happy that git is one of those 
projects where everything happens in one spot: Development, 
bug-reporting and general discussion. It makes it a lot easier than 
disconnected systems where information is easily duplicated and becomes 
stale at other ends.

But that's just my oppinion,
Greetings, Jojo

-- 
Johannes Gilger <heipei@hackvalue.de>
http://hackvalue.de/heipei/
GPG-Key: 0x42F6DE81
GPG-Fingerprint: BB49 F967 775E BB52 3A81  882C 58EE B178 42F6 DE81

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Andreas Ericsson]

jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
> Anyway, I have this file
>   -rw-r--r--  1   19561 2009-01-13 03:26 DietCherries17
> where I have 17 tiny documentation patches that sent to
> git@vger.kernel.org but nothing happened.
> Perhaps I could send them to a volunteer who could see if any of them
> are useful and then do something with them. Thanks.

That's really not how things work around here, or on any OSS project
I've ever been engaged in. It's your itch to scratch, so before you
have a chance of getting anyone else to scratch it for you, you have
to either make those others interested enough to volunteer to do it
for you, or you get to scratch away as much as you like yourself.

The longer and more difficult way is to scratch the itches of so
many others that people want to help you out because the chance
you'll do something else which is *also* productive is high enough
to warrant it. So far, you seem more interested in shooting from
the hip, sending patches at random that have little or no impact
on anything and that nobody else is genuinely interested in. That's
fine if you also pick up the pieces of your poor aim and actually
follow through but when it really just causes more work for others
than the end-result would have been worth to start with, the net
result is counter-productive and you have to work harder when you
have ideas/patches that are actually good than you would have been
forced to with a better overall signal-to-noise ratio.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[jidanni]

Thank you for your response.

http://jidanni.org/test/DietCherries17 are some things that I
previously posted to git@vger.kernel.org, but did not get explicitly
accepted or rejected.

You see I feel I am about to enter a month where even simple
subtraction and division seems a challenge (mental health not the
best.)

With a bug tracker, at least one knows somebody saw something for
sure, and it didn't just float by. That way one could register items
into it on one's good days, and then take a break, which I am going to
do now. Thanks.

Re: git maintenance bug tracker sooner better than later

[Johannes Gilger]

On 2009-02-06, jidanni@jidanni.org <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> With a bug tracker, at least one knows somebody saw something for
> sure, and it didn't just float by. That way one could register items
> into it on one's good days, and then take a break, which I am going to
> do now. Thanks.

And what "bugs" would you file? If I look at your patch-series which 
consists of oneliner documentation nitpicking, I don't even want to 
imagine how much these would get blown up by a web-based bug-tracker.

The web-based is the second part: When working on/with *git*, a 
command-line tool, I naturally work in a terminal, and I *don't* want to 
fire up a webbrowser to communicate something as simple as a bug. Also 
bug-trackers tend to attract all sorts of people who don't really think 
or try to find bugs before submitting them. Those sorts of people 
probably already file bugs for git and the distribution-maintainers then 
tell them to report the problem upstream (i.e.: here) or do it 
themselves.

-- 
Johannes Gilger <heipei@hackvalue.de>
http://hackvalue.de/heipei/
GPG-Key: 0x42F6DE81
GPG-Fingerprint: BB49 F967 775E BB52 3A81  882C 58EE B178 42F6 DE81