GNATS...

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Neil Booth wrote:

> What about using Bugzilla?  That would also have the benefit that bug
> submitters could amend and close their own bug reports, without the
> current silliness where someone (often me) has to run around chasing
> them up.  It also seems to be being actively developed rather than
> stagnating, and have all kinds of nice features GNATS doesn't have.

What I'd consider feature requirements for any new GCC bug tracking
system:

1. Works in a generally mail-based system: bug submission by a gccbug
script, bugs sent to gcc-bugs / gcc-prs mailing lists, follow-ups that go
to a bug tracking system address stored with the bug and sent on the
gcc-prs, full audit trails of every change to a bug sent to gcc-prs.

2. Handles MIME in mail.

3. Where files are attached in web submissions, they appear in mail as
MIME attachments, compressed if large, not as base64-encoded junk needing
manual decoding (as at present).

4. All existing URLs for individual PRs get redirected to the
corresponding URLs in the new system.

5. Follow-ups sent to gcc-gnats for existing PRs get filed properly in any
new system.

6. No login required for browsing of bugs or submitting new bugs.

7. Preferably possible to do all administration by mail (as with debbugs).
(If more security than debbugs is wanted, plaintext passwords (as at
present) or digital signatures can be used to authenticate changes.)

8. Either stores bug reports in a format such than non-experts can readily
locate and fix corruption, or a commitment must be available of sysadmin
time to fix corruption problems rapidly.  ISTR that Bugzilla uses a
database backend - which I'm not competent to fix corruption problems
with, and I had to deal with the last problem with PRs getting lost since
the main sysadmins weren't interested (see
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/overseers/2001-q2/msg00156.html and related
messages).

9. The web interface should not treat the absence of bugs matching a
search as either an error condition or an opportunity for a silly message;  
it should simply state the absence of matching bugs.

The current GNATS setup only fits 4, 5 and 8.  How does Bugzilla do?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk