Python to use a non open source bug tracker?

[Paul Boddie]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Giovanni Bajo" <noway at sorry.com> writes:
> >
> > Does this smell "Bitkeeper fiasco" to anyone else than me?

I probably said as much before, possibly to the distaste of some
individuals. Still, the BitKeeper story should serve as a reminder
about relinquishing control of infrastructure to some seemingly
benevolent third party with their own separate interests. It should
especially be a reminder to those who deem Torvalds-style "overt
pragmatism" to be virtuous in the face of supposedly ideological
realism.

Of course, there's presumably a huge gulf between the vendor in this
case and the vendor in the BitKeeper case, especially with respect to
draconian non-compete clauses and threats to sue one's own customers.
However, it's certainly not some kind of heresy to at least question
the wisdom of moving community resources and services around in such a
way. After all, this situation has been brought about because of a
dependence on a supposedly unreliable commercial third party.

> Sounds crazy, what's wrong with bugzilla?

Well, Bugzilla is a bit of a monster. ;-) Seriously, having installed
it, it seems like a relic of the early CGI period with a bunch of files
that you're supposed to throw in a CGI directory before performing
.htaccess surgery, which they admittedly do for you if you choose to
trust that particular method of deployment. Contrast that with various
other common Web applications which only put actual CGI programs within
the CGI directory, making the whole deployment much cleaner and easier
to troubleshoot/maintain, and you can see that there's a serious need
for some repackaging work.

Sure, there are scripts to help check dependencies, which meant a trip
to CPAN (not as joyous as its advocates would have you believe), and
there is a nice configuration system in Bugzilla's own Web interface
which helps you finish the job off (providing you don't forget
something in the 16 pages of settings), but there's always this nasty
suspicion that something somewhere probably isn't configured properly.
Finally, on the subject of the inner workings of Bugzilla, one is
presented with the amusement of diving into Perl to fix stuff:
something that not everyone is enthusiastic about.

As for Bugzilla's interface, it is telling that some open source
projects actually put a layer on top of Bugzilla in order to avoid the
complexity of the search interface, although it must be said that
recent versions don't seem to immediately throw up the page with 40 or
so controls on it, just to search for a bug. That said, the fact that
many open source projects continue to use Bugzilla would suggest that
they're either not interested in or aware of alternatives (quite
possible), or they're reasonably happy with it (also quite possible).

Paul