Various problems seen in RC1

[Aristedes Maniatis]

On 27/09/09 9:52 AM, Robert Watson wrote:
> Unfortunately, I fell behind due to running the developer summit and
> EuroBSDCon, but really that's a symptom of an underlying problem: I was
> (and
> am) manually maintaining the wiki list based on re@ e-mail correspondence.
>
> That is fundamentally the wrong approach--we should be using the
> bug-tracking system to manage pending requests and known issues.  In
> particular, I'd like each merge request and in-progress issue to be
> captured by a bug entry, and referenced during commits and merges.  This
> would allow 99% of the information on the wiki page to be mechanically
> generated, and avoid the "missed stuff" problem.  We'd also have to get
> better at saying "it's a real bug but we can't
> fix it for this release" explicitly, of course.
>
> There's not an opportunity to fix that for 8.0, but my recommendation
> has been that we at least use gnats, if not some more capable,
> issue-tracking system to handle pending changes and merge requests, with
> approvals to commit to
> branches linked back to the request so re@ can track what's going on.

Absolutely! And my mention of your wiki page was certainly not a criticism of your efforts with the wiki page. A valiant effort I think (and much more useful than no information at all), but as you say, fundamentally doomed. Far too much work to maintain over more than a very short period. I sent you/Mark an email in February about this topic and my offer to help because I think this is one area where FreeBSD communication channels could be significantly improved without creating more work (after the short term effort of change of course).

Any one of about a dozen sophisticated bug trackers would be capable of integrating svn linking, bug tracking, feature requests, feature voting, milestone management, developer task assignment, release management, release notes, and even have a workflow component that could integrate with the ports lifecycle (port owners without commit rights).

Regards
Ari Maniatis

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