[squeak-dev] The Future of Bugs.Squeak.org?

Ken Causey ken at kencausey.com
Sat Dec 22 01:16:15 UTC 2012


Some statistics regarding activity on bugs.squeak.org in 2012 to date 
(Jan 1, 2012 - Dec 21, 2012):

Issues in any project or category with any activity at all: 26

24 of these are in the Squeak project, 2 in the Spoon project.  The 
Squeak Packages project had zero activity in 2012.

Only 20 people either reported on, commented on, or updated any issue in 
2012.  However only 3 people participated in more than one issue and 
only 2 of those participated on more than 2 issues.  I think you can 
guess which 2 from this thread.

Ken

On 12/21/2012 05:30 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
> On 21 December 2012 21:35, Ken Causey<ken at kencausey.com>  wrote:
>> We are currently in the process of migrating all of our Internet services
>> from an old server to a new one (kindly donated by Gandi.net).  In the
>> process I'm re-evaluating all of the services and the software used to
>> support them.
>>
>> One issue I think we need to seriously evaluate as a community is our issue
>> tracking mechanism.  I among others some years ago strongly advocated for a
>> transition to Mantis.  I can't honestly say that that has been a success.
>> While there has been some activity on bugs.squeak.org in the last couple of
>> days, there has been very very little in the last year and most of that is
>> from just a handful of users.
>>
>> Maintaining bugs.squeak.org has costs and the server resources we have are
>> taxed by the services we are maintaining.  When I look over what we offer
>> and what is used by the community, it seems like our Mantis instance is
>> little valued.  Frankly I'm disinclined to set it up on the new server.
>>
>> I want to keep this email short but I think there are many other
>> alternatives that are less costly (in service resources) and that would
>> hopefully get more traction in the community.
>>
>> How many of you would even notice if bugs.squeak.org disappeared?
>
> I would notice.
>
> It may not look like it, but I use Mantis as a reference for all sorts of
> VM issues. There are issues and bugs that may go for years until they are
> finally driven to resolution, and having a bug tracker like this makes it
> possible to make this happen. Just as an example, every FFI implementation
> for Squeak/Pharo is broken 64-bit platforms. The issue was recognized years
> ago but fixes have not been implemented in any of the current FFI implementations.
> One of these days, this *will* be fixed, and somebody somewhere is going to
> be very happy to have the reference documentation, patches, changes sets,
> and test results available on a bug tracker system. I have no strong opinions
> as to what issue tracker to use (*), but I will say this:
>
> 1) Having *some* issue tracker is a really good thing.
>
> 2) The information in our current issue tracker (Mantis) has value and
> should be preserved if possible.
>
> Dave
>
> (*) I still think that BFAV was a really good thing, because it encouraged
> bug fixing as an activity within Squeak. The tool itself was not so perfect,
> but we have lots of people on the list who like building tools, so maybe
> someone can pick up on the concept and turn it into something better. To me,
> being able to open up a Squeak BFAV bug fixing viewer with a fresh cup of
> good coffee in the morning was always a nice way to pass some time.


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