Re: [Monotone-devel] Announce: DisTract - Distributed Bug Tracker based on Monotone

[Matthew Sackman]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 09:55:07AM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> Correct me if you have already considered this, however I think more
> work needs to be done on tracking where a bug is fixed and where the
> bug remains open.
> 
> For example, just marking the bug as fixed could be confusing if you
> sync the BTS before you sync the repository containing the bug fix. Or
> for people using other branches. How do I know if my branch is fixed?

Right, so, whilst each bug has its own branch, that branch is simply for
the bug and not for any further code. It might be possible in future
development to correlate a bug branch with a particular code branch,
which would then allow, for example, deriving the status of a bug from
whether the branch has been propagated back into the trunk branch.

> Maybe a possibility is a field:
> 
> fixed-in-version: 1234
> 
> ...and have software that automatically assumes all descendents of
> this version are fixed.

I certainly had envisaged detecting revision Ids and doing links on them
in much the same way as bugzilla detects bug numbers (and I've done some
hacks on bugzilla to make it detect cvs numbers aswell).

> This in turn might cause problems is the change is reverted for some
> reason and redone in a later revision or maybe even in another branch.

Yes, which is why having effectively no correlation between bug status
and code is much simpler (for me, writing DisTract, right now)!

> It also raises the issue - say I search for bug reports and find my
> bug has been fixed in version 1234. Then what? How do I find version
> 1234? If the repository containing this version hasn't been synced yet
> to the repository you are using it might be awkward.

It may well be. Two things stand out though. Firstly, I'd imagine that
typical use would be to have code in a trunck branch at a.b.c and bugs
in a branch at a.b.c.bugs. All other code branches would be under
a.b.c.*. Thus you have two opitions: you can either mark a bug as fixed
when you propagate that branch back into a.b.c. Then syncing will be
fine as you'd sync a.b.c at the same time as a.b.c.bugs. Or, you mark as
fixed with a revision Id. You'd then need to ensure you sync a.b.c* to
be sure that everyone who could see the fixed bug could also see the
branch in which it was fixed.

Thanks for your comments - these are certainly early days with DisTract
so far, barely two weeks of development have passed!

Matthew
-- 
Matthew Sackman
http://www.wellquite.org/