GNU GNATS 4.0 beta1 released (fwd)

[Daniel Berlin]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Joseph S. Myers wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> 
> > FYI.  I believe Jeff has raised a critical point wrt. to switching
> > from GNU Software (GNATS) to non-GNU Software (Bugzilla).
> 
> Bugzilla is Free Software, used by GNOME.
Not only that, GNOME switched from debbugs to bugzilla (GPL -> non-GPL).


>  No GNATS developers have said
> anything about how GNATS 4 fares relative to my wishlist though I pointed
> it out on gnats-devel
> <URL:http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gnats-devel/2001-q4/msg00121.html>,
> whereas we have had useful comments from Bugzilla developers.  Has anyone
> asked RMS about the acceptability of switching to Bugzilla?

I thought this type of decision was made by the SC, not RMS?
"Its primary purpose is to make major decisions in the best interests of 
the GCC project and to ensure that the project adheres to its fundamental principles found in the project's 
mission statement. [see the original announcement below]."
The mission statement also says that it will use developer friendly tools 
and procedures, and that besides the compilers (which it says will be 
GPL'd), "  * Other components (runtime libraries, testsuites, etc) will be  
available under various free licenses with copyrights being held by 
individual authors or the FSF."

So bugzilla is not only not incompatible with gcc's mission statement, it 
would seem to fit right in (even if you consider a bug reporting system a 
"component").

> There has been and is plenty of opportunity for GNATS developers to
> present the case for GNATS 4 to GCC, relative to the various features
> people have wanted - those on my list, but also others that may not be
> present in Bugzilla either such as automatic verification of bugs,
What do you mean by "automatic verfication of bugs"
 keeping
> track of a bug's status in multiple GCC versions,
You can use meta-bugs to do this, having one meta bug for the bug that 
depends on the seperate bugs for each version it occurs in.
This is also easy to do (at least, i've got a patch installed in the 
bugzilla i've been working on that makes it easy to do) from an interface 
standpoint. You can simply select a bunch of bugs, and click a button to 
have it create a bug that depends on all of those bugs.

Using one bug for multiple versions is not really a good idea, because you 
end up duplicating so much info (you may consider it not useful for a 
release 3.0, but want to fix it for 3.1, so you'd need to also include 
target milestones, etc, in this single bug. You'd also want to be able to 
fix it in two different ways (disabling on a branch, doing the work on 
the mainline), so you wouldn't want discussion and whatnot of each fix 
getting in the way of the other).

>  sending unparsable mail
> to a moderator for manual filing if not spam rather than forming new
> "pending" PRs from it.  (Any GNATS developers wishing to comment should
> read through the past Bugzilla discussions on all the GCC lists in order
> to accumulate a full list of what people have wanted, and note that
> different people have different views on the desirability of particular
> features.)
>