Message-ID: <4C6D17E0.5010506@blunn.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:39:12 +0100
From: William Blunn <bill+cygwin AT blunn DOT org>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Bug tracker (was: ImageMagick: More insufficient package dependencies)
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On 18/08/2010 21:50, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Aug 18 21:32, William Blunn wrote:
>    
>> On 18/08/2010 19:26, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>      
>>> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 06:40:17PM +0100, William Blunn wrote:
>>>        
>>>> My apologies to all the folks NOT involved in maintaining the ImageMagick package, but there doesn't appear to be any defined process for reporting bugs which might narrow down the attention-grab to a more relevant set of people.
>>>>          
>>> Actually, this is the defined way to report bugs in a cygwin package.
>>>        
>> Ahhhh I see. It's /defined/ to be mediocre.
>>
>> Rather than attempting to solve the problem head-on, redefine the
>> problem domain so that the problem is already solved.
>>
>> Inspired.
>>      
> Is there something in the water lately, which makes people on the list more aggressive than usual?
>
> It hasn't been redefined at all.

Quite right. I think I wasn't intending to imply that the situation had 
been literally *re* defined to something other than what it was 
originally, but rather to speak in a metaphor, which I can see now 
wasn't clear. My mistake.

> It's the common way of reporting problems for a long time: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
>    

Key point here being "for a long time". Cygwin's development and 
maintenance environment has, as far as I can see, stood still, or at 
least moved only very little over the years, whilst the rest of the 
world moved forward and got useful thinks like bug trackers.

To me, compared to the rest of the world (and I'm thinking about things 
like Sourceforge and Google Code), the Cygwin development and 
maintenance environment looks quite dated.

I realise that I am going to look like the bad guy by being critical. I 
have had people criticise me in the past. Whilst I may have been annoyed 
at the time, on some occasions, after reflection, I realised that the 
person was right and I made changes for the better.

> If you don't like it, I'm sorry.  Are you going to volunteer to maintain a Cygwin packages bug-tracking system?
>    

That is an interesting point. The thought had crossed my mind that I 
could set up my own bug tracker, and that this might actually be useful 
to the project.

To be sure, I had wondered if I could set up such a system and include a 
moderate amount of advertising on the site and that this might prove to 
be a moderately profitable activity.

But, having a sniff round, it seems that Cygwin operates under the 
sourceware.org umbrella. And sourceware.org also seems to cover GCC. And 
GCC appears to have a Bugzilla.

So I am wondering that server resource is not the issue. Would I be 
correct in thinking that?

It might be helpful if I could be clear what the reasons for not having 
a bug tracker are.

I could take a stab as:

1. It is not the feeling of the Cygwin maintainers that a bug tracker 
would provide a significantly better solution than the current mailing 
list solution

2. There is not any human resource around to do the top-level 
maintenance of such a system

I would be interested to know if tallies with your thinking or whether I 
have gotten something wrong or missed something.

Bill

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