[darcs-users] a new issue tracker that darcs developers could consider using (Re: bugs.darcs.net issues)

Jason Dagit dagit at codersbase.com
Mon May 12 17:20:45 UTC 2008


On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 9:39 AM, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:

> On May 12, 2008, at 9:35 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:
>
>  To open issue tickets in this tracker, send e-mail to "
> > > darcsbugs at allmydata.org".
> > >
> >
>
>  I did that, http://allmydata.org/trac/darcs-2/ticket/7  But now I can't
> > seem to edit the bug nor did I receive confirmation email.  Is an account
> > required?  If so, that's not so bad for devs, they'd probably want an
> > account anyway, but I can see that being very annoying for users.
> >
>
>
> I just changed the setting to allow anonymous users to edit tickets.
>  (I've seen spammers abuse such functionality in the past, but if they do so
> again then we'll just clean up after them and then reconsider this setting.)


Bah, spammers have to ruin everything don't they.


>
> I added a comment to your ticket #7: http://allmydata.org/trac/
> darcs-2/ticket/7


Thanks, that was illustrative.  The viewing of patches in trac seems no
worse than that of roundup.  I can't really complain here I think.
Although, could trac be configured so that if a patch is attached to a
ticket you can do "intelligent" things with it?  I imagine roundup could do
this too, but as far as I know, no one has ever done that.  But, then darcs
is a bit different than many projects in that patches nearly always go to
the mailing list even when they fix a bug.  It seems that most other
projects submit bug fixes to the bug tracker and they are downloaded and
applied from there.  I always think automation of that step would be cool :)


> This behavior of trac has bothered me more than once in the past, until I
> got used to bracketing all of the literal text between {{{ }}}.  Now I'm
> used it it, and I appreciate distinction between text and literal in tickets
> (because it is useful to reformat text in a variable-width font to fit your
> web browser page, but it is better to preserve indentation and line wrapping
> verbatim in a fixed-width font for source code snippets or shell
> transcripts).  However, if you want I can figure out how to disable that
> behavior and make it treat all text as literal unless specified otherwise.
>
> By the way, a lot of "[tool] is a bit obnoxious to use" is a matter of
> personal preference or familiarity.  This particular behavior of trac was
> obnoxious to me several times until I finally trained myself to adjust to
> it.  On the other hand, it is the only behavior of trac that I can think of
> at the moment which was obnoxious.  I've had a lot more "obnoxious moments"
> with roundup over the years than with trac -- too many to list in the
> margins of this e-mail.  Your mileage may vary.


I think most of my annoyances revolve around the assumption that every user
has an account.  It's unfortunate that spammers make this such an important
thing to do.  Does trac support Open ID by any chance?  If I use a site
often I like to have an account, but for casual use I want to just use it
and not worry about an account.  I think I'm getting off topic.

Oh and yes there is an OpenID plugin:
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AuthOpenIdPlugin


>
>
>
>  Those rXXXX numbers are not such a good idea with darcs.  I'd much rather
> > have a link to the patch name.
> >
>
>
> That would be cool.  Trac already supports mercurial revision ids, which
> are a string of hex chars, so this feature could be added by various hackers
> including the trac folks, Lele Gaifax, myself, and the members of this list.
>
> In the meantime, the way to reference patches at http://allmydata.org/trac/darcs-2,
> by revision number, like this:
>
> http://allmydata.org/trac/darcs-2/changeset/5706
>
> Is better than the way to reference patches at http://darcs.net, which is
> currently "There is no way to do it.".  There used to be a darcs.cgi, but
> David Roundy disabled it because it was (if I recall correctly) leaking
> memory and because nobody, least of all David, had time to debug and
> administer it.


If I understand things correctly that number, the 5706 for example, is an
index into the sequence of patches as darcs stored them (or maybe as it
received them?).  I'm concerned that doing an optimize reorder on the
repository (or even merging a patch deep into an existing sequence) will
throw off the number.  Maybe the darcs+trac author already considered this.


>
>  The "view changes" button that appears on some pages seems broken or
> > silly.
> >
>
>
> What's the "view changes" button?  Oh, there it is.  <Zooko tries it.>
>
> Yeah, that's useless.  I've never noticed its existence before.  Instead,
> click on the "Revision Log" link at the top of the page when you are viewing
> a file.  It shows you a list of all patches which have touched that file and
> allows you to diff any pair of them.  Cool, eh?


Yes, the Revision Log button is much, much nicer and pretty much exactly
what I had in mind.


>
>
>
>  The "Buildbot" button takes you to the buildbot, of course, and the "View
> > > Tickets" and "New Ticket" buttons do just what you'd expect.
> > >
> >
>
>  I went looking for this promised "New Ticket" button but I cannot find
> > it.
> >
>
>
> You want anonymous users to be able to create tickets, too?  Okay, done.
>  Now there is a "New Ticket" button even if you haven't logged in.


Can I eat my cake and have it too? :-)  I like there to be no barriers to
bug report submission.  Even a small barrier means missed bug reports.
Especially if they are coming from a frustrated user.


>
>  Next I looked at the search page.  From here, I can do a search of
> > tickets, but it seems extremely limited.  I think even the current roundup
> > search, which I'm not terribly fond of, is better.
> >
>
>
> Can you be more specific?  I personally find that it is hard to find
> tickets on http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe (the trac that I use for my
> work and my most important open source project), but that it is even harder
> to find tickets on http://bugs.darcs.net .
>

I'm not sure what I need.  I don't know much about searches other than
google tends to work pretty well for me and most other things don't.  The
reason I commented on the trac search is because it doesn't seem to have
very many knobs to turn.  What I saw was a very simple search with no
obvious advanced search.  Maybe I just need to learn to use filters.


>
>
>  Is the site indexed by google?  Given the current URL I think if I
> > specified site:allmydata.org I would get too much.
> >
>
>
> You can use the google "inurl" feature:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aallmydata.org+inurl%3Adarcs-2+dagit
>
> But a better solution would be to make http://bugs.darcs.net be the name
> of this trac instance.


Thanks.  I'll try to remember this trick.


>
>  Yes, the annotate feature is pretty nice, although I found it tricky to
> > actually go visit the patches that are linked in the margin.  It seems to
> > require some combination of clicking and then hovering.  And then I was
> > told:
> > OperationalError: database is locked
> >
>
>
> Both the "seems to require a combination of clicking and then hovering"
> and the "database is locked" are because it took darcs a long time to do the
> file annotate.  Trac could potentially be improved by giving user feedback
> indicating that your click is being served before the revision control tool
> finishes generating the content, and by releasing the database lock while
> waiting for the revision control tool to answer queries, but of course the
> more interesting improvement to me would be to make darcs faster at
> answering such queries.
>
> For what it is worth, trac+darcs caches the results, so subsequent views
> of the same data will be fast.


I see.  Not ideal and not a show stopper.


> Thanks!
>
> It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.  Also, what's the alternative?
>  Currently if you go to the darcs front page at "http://darcs.net", it
> says:
>
>  * The Darcs Wiki
>  * Bug Tracking System
>  * Darcs repository browser
>
> Those are three different tools, two of which are currently broken.  (The
> bug tracker has been broken for around 48 hours now, the repository browser
> has been broken for weeks or months.)


Yes that is sad, and the duplicate bug reports from roundup are getting old.


>
> And who is going to fix them?  I'm not.  I hope David Roundy isn't,
> because he has better things to do with his time.
>
> If we switch to trac, then we get three main advantages:
>
> 1.  All three of those services are integrated with each other in one
> tool.


I don't see this as a huge win.  Often the do-many-things tools are weak in
each category.  Obviously the do-only-one-thing tools find it harder to
cooperate.  To me there is rarely a clear winner.


>
>
> 2.  Active development of trac means more people to fix bugs and extend
> functionality


I like this.


>
> 3.  I'm willing to system-administrate it.


That's probably a good thing.  I don't think David wants to have the
sysadmin burden.

Well it sounds like you have identified some valid problems with the status
quo, and your suggested fix deals with all of them as far as I can tell.  If
I woke up tomorrow and roundup was a thing of the past and I had to learn
trac I would probably be okay with that.

Jason
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