[Python-Dev] New bugtracker project

[Mark Hammond]

[Guido]
> 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,

I must have missed this, as I have been seeing people who *use* bugzilla
rave about it, and people who haven't assume it must suck.  Of particular
note, the opinions of *developers* using the system are, IMO, more important
than the opinions of the *reporters*.  Having a system that encourage users
to report bugs, but discourage developers from fixing them would not be
productive.  People can not "walk in off the street" and start filing
meaningful bugs.  If the barrier to entry is that these users must invest a
little time in learning how to search bugzilla then that is a good thing.

IMO, roundup would be *excellent* as an "short-lived interest list" - eg,
for discussing a single PEP over its life time.

I would really like to hear some experiences from people who have actually
*used* roundup in this kind of environment (as opposed to people who have
said "it is 100% Python, so it must be cool" ;)  I do know that ActiveState
*did* use roundup (for basically that exact reason), but it *quickly* became
apparent that this wasn't reasonable.  It was an earlier version of roundup,
but still, it was a square peg in a round hole - roundup was *not* designed
as a general purpose bug tracking tool.  bugzilla is.

Please - if we are going to go through this pain, let us make sure that the
tool we choose is appropriate for the task.  bugzilla has a number of
reference sites we could look at, but I am not aware of any such bugtracking
systems hosted by roundup.  Let us not make the same mistake AvtiveState
did - go through the pain of moving to roundup, just to find that the
requirement was really for a "real" bug tracking system, and doing it all
again.

FWIW, I have absolutely *no* interest in bugzilla other than as a very happy
user.

Mark.