Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> wrote:
> Hi Lex.
> 
> Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> > Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> wrote:
> > > As far as
> > > I know, nobody bothers to ever [closed] bug reports, because they don't
> > > bother anyone anyway - nobody is looking at them.
> > Well, this seems blatantly the wrong way to do things.  
> I'm not saying its right, I'm saying its a fact, and as far as I know,
> always has been.
> 
> > We should have a
> > real bug reporting mechanism.  People should be able to report bugs
> > without having a fix for them, and those reports should be managed.
> I don't understand what you mean by "managed". I hate to see the waste
> coming from peoples bug reports being used as little as they are now.
> Adding to that more wasted energy of tracking them  seems meaningless,
> unless they are *used* for something. Can you please elaborate how you
> think we could incorporate bug reports into the communities work?
> 
> Because right now it isn't a part of our work, and I think finding the
> right way to integrate it is the only way we'll get more benefit from
> them.

It requires a little bit of tool support.  For example, the bug tracker
and patches tracker on SourceForge are a good model; try clicking on
"Bugs" and/or "Patches" on the following page:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/squeak/


The simplest thing a bug tracker lets us do is let us see, at a glance,
what bugs are still considered open and which are considered closed. 
Bug trackers also let us attach a thread of commentary to each bug. 
Slightly fancier trackers let you merge bug reports that address the
same bug.


It would be ideal if there were Squeak  tools to talk to the bug
database, but IMHO this isn't that big of a deal.

In fact, I think we would be just fine using the SourceForge bug
tracker.  Or the Debian bug tracker, for that matter.  For SourceForge
we would simply need to create a new project, e.g. "squeak-image", and
use the bug tracker there.  We could distribute files via SourceForge,
too.  For Debian's BTS, we'd need to host our own server.  The advantage
would be that there is a convenient mechanism for dividing up bugs by
which package they are associated with.


But maybe Goran is going to come up with some magic any day now.  :)

-Lex