Re: Linux 2.6.21

Anton Altaparmakov
2007-04-30T07:46:17Z

On 29 Apr 2007, at 22:24, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Exactly because I don't think anybody has shown any better
> automation than
> bugzilla. But that doesn't make bugzilla "the One Choice". That's
> not how
> it works. If there is no automation, manual tracking is still
> better than
> *crap* automation.

Have you seen/used RT? -> http://bestpractical.com/rt

We use it here at work and it works great. People can report bugs
both by email or via web interface. We get everything that comes in
emailed to us and we can respond by email and RT recognizes the
responses being in the same thread and lumps them into the same bug
(and when the origin was by email that is even without evil bug
numbers appearing in the subject with the help of some perl scrip
magic (aka RT action script)). The only time I ever go into the web
interface is about once a week to have a look at my list of open bugs
and to do some tidying like merging bug reports and things like that.

It also has some cool features like "extract this into the FAQ" and
there is a "FAQ" in RT that contains an autogenerated FAQ from what
people have pulled out in that way.

Only problem is for the kernel we would need a beefy system (needs
fast database or it gets very slow when you get into 100k+ bugs
region) and someone who knows RT well and has a lot of spare time to
set it up to your liking and then to maintain it... (RT takes a
while to set up because you can tweak just about everything and you
can add/modify/remove functionality at will as it is very modular and
written in Perl so pretty much anyone can adapt it to do exactly what
they want without even needing to wait for lengthy recompiles to
happen...)

You could for example automate sorting of bug reports into queues
(e.g. SCSI, Net, FS, etc) by grepping the emailed bug report (or
website generated one although on the website people can choose the
queue by hand if they want) and sorting appropriately. Admittedly
for this to be at all useful someone would have to spend some time
working out intelligent things to grep for or all bugs would match to
all queues when they contain dmesg output for example... (-;

This might not be perfect but in comparison to bugzilla it is
actually usable and at least we here at work like it so much we
adopted it into our workflow voluntarily which says something...

Best regards,

Anton
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Unix Support, Computing Service, University of Cambridge, CB2 3QH, UK
Linux NTFS maintainer, http://www.linux-ntfs.org/