[Kolab-devel] Bugzilla (Re: Native Packaging, Issue Tracking & Restructuring the SCM)

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

Sascha Wilde wrote:
> "Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)" <vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com> writes:
> > I would, still, appreciate a rationale stating why you have such a strong
> > preference against Bugzilla, so that I can get an impression of what we
> > seek in an issue tracker.
> 
> Hi Jeroen,
> 
> - I want quick and simple, non discriminating, anonymous access to an
>   complete overview of existing bugs.
> 
>   Your current Bugzilla demo shows a typical problem here: accessing
>   https://bugzilla.kolabsys.com/ I see no list of bugs but a bunch of
>   text, links an forms -- none of them indicating a way to simply
>   "browse" all issues.  "Search existing bug reports" seems the best bet
>   to me, even though I don't want to enter a search term.  So I leave
>   the field empty -- which does not work.  Next link to try would be the
>   small "reports" (like in "Bug Reports", but that turns out to be even
>   less what I want.
> 

What you seek is here;

  https://bugzilla.kolabsys.com/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr

but indeed there is no simple way exposed like through a link or on the front 
page that matches that search or "all open bugs". Noted how this is a rather 
old version of Bugzilla; normally this would be the user's frontpage including 
everything you've indicated you are interested in.

>   I'm pretty sure it is possible to do what I want with Bugzilla, but
>   having to search that hard for it is already frustrating me.
> 

Yeah, I have the exact same thing the other way around, being used to queuing 
up tickets and then actually handling them according to an established work 
flow -such as all tickets I'm CC'ed on -not by other people but automatically, 
and the things that end up in my queue automatically because of a set of 
conditions that change the issue to actually be mine.

> - Even more important on my personal feature list -- and not supported
>   by most trackers: I want a complete email interface.
> 

Bugzilla can handle email quite well, even a git-throw-over-fence type of 
patch thread can be made tickets dependent on one another (and be closed 
according to sign-off/push in the upstream SCM).

> As said before, these are only two examples, there are more -- for
> example the clear UI of roundup, compared to the rather overwhelming
> collection of options and selections in other trackers...
> 

Thank you, I'll write these three down in the wiki, two of them I think can 
easily be addressed by updating to a more recent version of bz and some 
skinning which we'd be doing anyway -but we'll have to see it when that has 
happened.

Kind regards,

-- 
Jeroen van Meeuwen
Senior Engineer, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
t: +316 42 801 403
w: http://www.kolabsys.com

pgp: 9342 BF08