[Dovecot] Bug tracking system

[Timo Sirainen]

Took a while to reply because I haven't wanted to spend time on thinking
about this.

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 22:23 +0100, Udo Rader wrote:
> > Also I'd rather not require users to register into the BTS at all to add
> > new bugs. Just writing the bug subject, description and giving an email
> > address should be enough.
> 
> Yes, that is possible as well. There are two options for this:
> 
> #1 Users remain unidentified and the bug is posted as a global user
> 
> #2 Users are looked up based upon their email address. If an unknown
> email address enters a bug report or adds note to an existing bug
> report, it is automatically added as a BTS user.
> 
> The latter has the big advantage that users can identify their own
> bugreports/notes much easier later on.

Yep. 2) is good.

> Well, the disadvantage of this however is that it requires some
> countermeasures to prevent spammers from using it as their way to make
> us all happy with their lottery winnings, "enlargment" stuff and
> such :-)

Would be nice to get it integrated with this mailing list's
subscriptions list. Subscribers can send bugs immediately,
non-subscribers' bugs get moderated. Just like they are now. And bugs
sent via web page wouldn't require moderation but a really simple
captcha (like wiki.dovecot.org has now), which should prevent all
spambots.

Maybe the Mailman's subscriptions list could be pushed to the
bugreporting system whenever it changes.

> > > #3: allow email based replies based on the subject line that go back 
> > >     directly into the bugtracker
> > 
> > Also from people not registered to the bug tracker? What about
> > creating/preserving Message-ID / References headers so that the comments
> > in one bug also show up as a single thread in the mailing list?
> 
> Yes, that is #2 from above. And about the headers ... the bugzilla email
> interface support this, mantis however (which I would favour for various
> reasons) does not support this out of the box AFAIK, but it is OSS, so
> it should not be too difficult to patch it.
> 
> Threading however is always possible based upon the subject of the
> autogenerated mails coming from the BTS.

I just always hate it when people break the threads in this mailing
list. Evolution uses only References/In-Reply-To headers to track them.

> > > All this can be easily setup for bugzilla and mantis (the only ones that
> > > I personally have dealt with to a greater extent so far).
> > > 
> > > If help is needed to get such a configuration working (also including
> > > hosting of such a solution), I personally (and the company I work for)
> > > would be happy to help out.
> > 
> > If the above two things could be made to work, I guess we could finally
> > have a bug tracker. :)
> 
> Sure, if I can provide anything to get things working, just let me know.

I'd at least like to try this. It would be nice to get a working bug
tracker before v1.0 release. But I still have doubts about how annoying
it would be to actually use, and how much time it would require to
change everything to work just the way I want. I've already spend too
much time changing MoinMoin, and Mailman's reply-to-list changes were
kind of a waste of time too :)

As for Bugzilla vs. Mantis, I'm not that big of a fan of Bugzilla, but I
pretty much hate how Mantis looks like at least in
http://www.futureware.biz/mantisdemo/. It's way too confusing.
Bugzilla's default look is OK, although in either case I'd want the
"report new bug" page to look something like
http://dovecot.org/tmp/bug.html
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