Re: RFC: Linux Bug Tracking & Feature Tracking DB

Timothy Covell
2001-12-29T19:20:39Z

On Saturday 29 December 2001 12:55, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 12:53:39AM -0600, Timothy Covell wrote:
> > 1. The maintainer of this DB would need to receive patches
> > along with patch.lsm and feature.lsm like files from the code
> > maintainers. That means that Linus, Alan, Marcello, Dave
> > Jones, et al., might have to be involved.
> >
> > 2. DB would be a high volume site (at least that's the idea!)
> >
> > 3. Would would pay for and maintain it? (I know, since I'm
> > the one putting forth the idea, it's mine to run with. However,
> > a. I ain't rich. b. following from a., I have no bandwidth 24kbps
> > dialup.)
>
> OK, we've got a prototype of something like this already, I don't claim
> it is ready for prime time, but you can go look at it here:
>
> http://bugs.bkbits.net/bugs.html
>
> You can run queries, etc.
>
> This is a fairly early version, so be gentle. The data in it is the
> current BitKeeper bug list (feel free to fix some :-)
>
> There are other ways to access the data, both command line and email
> are supported. Long term, I'd like to make the bug db be an NNTP server
> so you could do everything via a news reader, which would be bitchin'.
>
> If this is a first order approximation of what you want, we'll host
> it here if you like. We have a T1 line with lots of spare bandwidth
> at the moment. The machine that you are poking at is the same machine
> which hosts various BK repos, such as the Linux/PPC trees, Ted's linux24
> tree, Ted's e2fsprogs, NTP trees, GregKH's trees, Chris Wright's trees
> (he has a 25 tree based on Ted's 24 tree), Rik's VM tree, among others.
> We haven't talked about this very much because we don't have all the
> nifty sourceforge like indices and statistics, but long term this is
> headed towards something somewhat like a distributed sourceforge.
> We never liked the centralized model that sourceforge has, it becomes
> a single point of failure.
>
> One interesting, perhaps, point is that bugdb is a BitKeeper repository,
> which means you can clone it and take *all* of the data with you,
> unlike sourceforge. So if you were to become dependent on this and
> we ran out of bandwidth or something, you can clone the bug db and set
> up your own bug server elsewhere. In general, for both databases and
> source, that's the approach we want, i.e., we're happy to host it here
> to get you started but if you have needs that we can't meet, we'll make
> it easy for you to host elsewhere.

Thank you. That's a kind offer. I'm taking a look at it right now. So
your solution might solve the bandwidth issue, but the bigger issue
is what the big guys think, at least as far as I imagined the system.

timothy.covell@ashavan.org.