replacing GNATS?

[Glen Barber]

Hi, Alexander

Please note that as I am replying to your questions, I am in no
position to do so.  I do not (nor do I wish to appear to) represent
the FreeBSD project in the respect your questions are asked.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Alexander
Best<alexbestms at math.uni-muenster.de> wrote:
> thanks for the link. although this wasn't the interview i was referring to the
> announcement is great news.
>
> i don't quite understand though why there's the need to create a completely
> new bug tracking system. is this due to technical issues or rather a matter of
> not wanting to use what all the others are using? or to be more precise: a
> matter of pride.
>

I doubt it is a matter of pride, but more technical reasons.  The bug
tracking system for the FreeBSD project needs to be very specific --
who has what PR, which PRs are untouched, which PR was resolved by
which SVN commit, etc, etc.  This is in addition to the 'separation'
of the bugs -- networking, kernel, documentation, ports, and so on.

> quite often i've been thinking: dealing with freebsd in general could be so
> much easier if somebody just said: "alright! this is the way to go!"
>
> a lot of problems aren't really taken take of, but people talk about it for
> ages not wanting to let go of ancient software e.g.
>

In a BSDTalk podcast interviewing a few of the core team members, this
topic was brought up, and explained in some detail [1].  The situation
mentioned was the conversion from cvs to subversion, and how a change
like that, as easy as it may sound on paper, really is not a matter of
a simple code repository conversion -- there were a lot of things to
consider.  As I previously mentioned, I do not attempt to represent
anyone in the decision making process for the project, but I think it
is a safe assumption that these same considerations need to be taken
into account for other major changes.

[snip]

> or take bug reports in general. everybody's concentrating on adding new
> features to HEAD or participates in endless discussions about some unimportant
> technical stuff where basically everybody tries to show off their tech
> knowledge.
>

You sound like you're getting off topic to your own thread here...

> there are PR reports with patches included which solve critical and sometimes
> ancient bugs, but nobody's taking care of them. i know people who've been
> trying to use freebsd since 4.X, but were unable due to a panic which has been
> analysed and patched. the patch however never made it into the repository,
> because nobody seems to care.
>

Could you provide some examples?

> it's no big secret that submitting bug reports is basically a waste of time.

How so?

> if you have a patch for a problem and want to get it committed into HEAD or
> STABLE you have to get in contact with somebody who has write access to svn.
>

Isn't that where filing a PR comes in?

[1] - http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2009/05/bsdtalk173-few-freebsd-core-team.html

-- 
Glen Barber