Re: Why Emacs needs a modern bug tracker

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>>> I was thinking about this possibility and concluded that it is not
>>>>> possible to build a decent bug-tracking system using only a VCS. The
>>>>> reason is the importance of the user interface, which must be open to
>>>>> everybody, not only for the committers, as PROBLEMS and TODO are now,
>>>>> thus effectively dissuading possible contributions from the outside.
>>>> OK, VCS access IN ADDITION TO web access.  How about that?
>>> 
>>> Others just proposed such a system. I'm skeptical about it. So far, it
>>> seems quite limiting and for a good reason:
>> 
>> I do not get your point here. Can you explain why you are skeptical
>> and why you think it would be limiting in another way?

> Because of this:

>>>>> Furthermore, a bug-tracking system needs a database and a VCS is not
>>>>> good at that.

> A VCS provides a filesystem to work on, not a database.

> A bug tracker based on a VCS wouldn't provide more that what we can
> achieve now with FOR-RELEASE, TODO, etc.

I think you're confusing things a little: the database should be inside
a file like TODO which is itself managed via a VCS (actually the file
needs to be alongside the rest of the code).  This way when we merge the
unicode branch into the trunk (for instance), the unicode-branch bugs
database will "automatically" get merged into the trunk's bugs database.


        Stefan