Re: Linux 2.6.21

Diego Calleja
2007-04-29T19:40:45Z

So far, it seems that most of people's opinion WRT to bug reporting and trackingcan
be divided into 2 groups:

- People who argues (and they're right) that bugzilla and web interfaces in general
suck and that email + an "Adrian-like" solution works better

- People who argues that a bug tracker better than a mailing list is absolutely
needed (and they're right). They also argue that while bugzilla sucks, it's
better than nothing.

There's a common point between both groups: bugzilla sucks. The ideal
solution would be to replace bugzilla with some alternative and better
opensource bug tracking software, but I doubt it exists (there must be a
reason why everybody uses bugzilla). A good bug tracker should feel like
it makes your work easier, instead of making you feel like you're wasting
time (which is what bugzilla does)

I don't see why a web interface bug tracker should be bad for bug tracking,
as long as it's good and integrates 100% in the mailing lists. In my humble
opinion the "perfect" bug tracker for Linux should be something like this:
- Has a email interface (like the Debian bug tracking database).
- Has a web interface that completely follows the email threads
(reading/posting), but make the comments real emails, not just
database fields.
If done well (unlike the current bugzilla-to-email hack), it should possible
to do many nice things, like add a lkml bug report to the bug tracking
database (which shouldn't be a "real" database, but just an lkml mail
archive with a list of message IDs that are considered a bug and its state)
by just replying the thread, CCing the bug tracker and telling him to include
the thread in the database.

So unless someone is willing to write such tool (which I doubt, since it
doesn't looks easy), all this discussion seems pointless, and we should
stick with this http://kernelnewbies.org/known_regressions page
which is showing to be quite useful :)