• BugTracker

Thoughts on using the bug tracker effectively. These aren't tips, yet, just something I'm mulling over.

• need to distinguish between triaged and non-triaged bugs (but having something like a triaged topic seems like a pain)...
• possible states:
  • [Assigned] waiting for somebody to tell us something
  • [???] we know (roughly) what needs to be done, and we need to somebody to do the coding
  • [Assigned] we know what to do and we know who is the best person to do it
  • [Assigned] somebody is working on it right now

  • ... http://bugs.darcs.net/issue778 is an example of a bug I don't know how to pigeonhole... we can see that it may be a problem, but we don't know how to reproduce it, nor what to do about it... it's a "huh?", but is it untriaged, then?

• bugs which do not fit into one of these neat categories need to stand out somehow
• main problem is that from the front page, we can't tell the difference between untriaged bugs (our 'huh?' stack) and bugs we know what to do about, but we don't have anybody assigned to yet...

Title

Rough conventions (very informal! the goal is to make things easier to understand at a glance)

• 'command => specific error message (darcs version)'

• prefix wishes/features with 'wish: '

Priority

• feature vs. wishlist : these are priorities, so a feature is basically a wish that we really want to have (for example, progress reporting, back in the darcs 1.0 days), whereas a wish is just something that would be nice

Status

• undecided: duplicate vs. resolved vs. deferred:
  • I don't like using resolved for duplicates, because it makes it harder to search for a bug and determine if it has already been fixed or not
  • But if we just use 'duplicate' we can't tell if it's a duplicate of a fixed bug or not
  • Maybe: deferred for 'this is an interesting duplicate; if the superceder gets resolved, we should get back in touch with the reporter' and duplicate for 'this is a boring duplicate; no need to get back to the superceder'
• needs-eg vs. deferred:

  • Right now, I (EricKow) am using needs-eg to mean "waiting on somebody to get back to us with something specific"... what does deferred really mean for us?

• what does in-progress mean?
  • somebody is doing the hacking?
  • or: we know exactly what needs to be done; somebody just needs to do it [seems to be more this...]

Topic

Still feel like we're not using the Topics feature in the best way possible

• Default roundup doesn't display topics in a very nice way (I wish they were more like tags)
• Topics we ought to use more consistently: