[Python-Dev] New bugtracker project

[Guido van Rossum]

The Python Business Forum (http://pbf.nuxeo.org/) and McMillan
Enterprises, Inc. (http://www.mcmillan-inc.com/) are joining forces to
help the Python developers with their tasks.  (IOW, the PBF is funding
Gordon McMillan to do some hacking for us. :-)  The goal is that
through these efforts, the Python developers will be able to produce
and maintain stable Python releases that are usable by its business
members, while simultaneously continuing to develop and release
bleeding-edge releases for the hacker community.  Of course, today's
bleeding-edge release will become tomorrow's business release, but it
takes much water under the bridge for a release to mature enough to
that status.

I believe that one of the areas where we could use help is a bug
tracker.  While the SourceForge tracker that we currently use is
reasonable, it has many problems, and at least one meta-problem: we
don't control it, so the problems don't get fixed.  Some folks have
suggested to switch to Bugzilla, but that got a loud booh from people
who have tried it.  A much better option appears to be RoundUp:
Ka-Ping Yee's winning entry in the Software Carpentry competition,
re-implemented by Richard Jones and Anthony Baxter, with four
co-developers, now in beta (release 0.4.1 at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/roundup).  It's all Python, 

My proposal is for Gordon to join forces with Richard and Anthony and
the other RoundUp developers to make RoundUp usable for the needs of
the Python development team.  That's not just PythonLabs, but includes
all developers with checkin privileges, and to some extent all readers
of python-dev.  (Of course, it must be usable for the end users
reporting bugs too. :-)

The point of this message is to start gathering requirements.  Gordon
will gather requirements, and has asked me to send out this email to
announce the project to the Python developer community.  Some of my
own requirements:

- A way to migrate the existing SF tracker contents.  There are
  references to 6-digit SF tracker IDs all over the Python source code
  and CVS history, and it would be nice if these IDs were usable in
  the new tracker.

- Features that simplify the tracking of how bugs and patches relate
  to different release branches.  This could ease the work for release
  managers tremendously compared to the status quo.  It should be
  possible to indicate exactly which releases are affected by a bug,
  and also in which releases it is (or will be) fixed.  (Integration
  with CVS would be nice but seems out of scope.)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)