[darcs-users] clarifying bug tracker usage

Mark Stosberg mark at summersault.com
Fri Aug 15 02:33:39 UTC 2008


I'm replying to some bug tracker thoughts I found on the wiki. I thought I
would that here in case other people want to join the conversation.

>  * 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

I agree with this assessment of what they mean. I think we could do without the
"feature" priority, though.

If it's really a problem that we are missing a feature, we could call that a
bug, or we could track features as "wishlist" items that have been tagged as
"Release Critical" for the next release.

"feature" gets well-intentionally mis-used by users who are likely find the
difference between "wishlist" confusing. They mark a request as as "feature",
which I think only a developer/project manager should declare that a particular
change is desired in the next release. (While anyone can "wish" for something
to be considered).

By contrast, I don't see users adding a "release critical" tag to their submissions.

>  * 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

I would mark a bug a duplicate while the issue is still open (in some other
ticket) and then mark it as resolved when the other ticket is resolve, so that
the ticket requestors of the dupe ticket are notified that it is resolved. 

Other ticket trackers are smarter about duplicates and would merge the ticket requestors in this case,
which would save this extra step.

>    * 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'

I use 'deferred' as a way of saying "lower priority" Usually this goes along with wishlist requests.

>  * 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?

I like this use of "need-eg", although I just renamed it to "need-info", so it is a more general purpose way to say 
"the ball is stalled in the requestors court.

>  * what does in-progress mean?

Maybe it means "Quit bugging about this...we're activetly working on it". This tag doesn't get used much.

>   * or: we know exactly what needs to be done; somebody just needs to do it [seems to be more this...]

I just added "need-volunteer" to clarify this state.

    Mark

-- 
http://mark.stosberg.com/





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