OT: Distributed bug tracking?

[Matt Nordhoff]

Paul Sargent wrote:
> Apologies for the off topic post, but it might swing around to being  
> sort-of on topic.
> 
> I've never found a bug tracker I liked, but that maybe because I don't  
> know about the options. The big thing for me is that with all of the  
> decentralised advantages we have now, the other major tool for doing  
> collaborative development work is normally accessed through a web  
> site. Often slow and in an entirely different environment to where I  
> do all my other development work (CLIs and text editors), it becomes  
> totally inaccessible when on the road.
> 
> It strikes me that if the bug information was part of the source tree  
> (with a web interface somewhere so that users / managers can still  
> access it) then the information would be exactly where the developer  
> needed it. It would also be easy to see which change sets resolved  
> particular bugs because the change-set would include the change to the  
> bug report.
> 
> It seems like a simple directory will one file per bug report would be  
> 80% of the way there. You'd then need some scripts to handle them in a  
> controlled way.
> 
> Does anybody know of a system like this out there?
> If not, would it make sense to implement this as a mercurial  
> extension, with an extension to hgweb too?
> 
> e.g.:
>    hg bug open            # opens a new bug in text editor
>    hg bug append <bug-id> # opens text editor to allow more  
> information to be added
>    hg bug resolve <state> # sets the bug state to closed, duplicate,  
> etc.
>    hg bug report <option> # report all bugs that match some predicate
> 
> I think you might need some special merge logic, so that two people  
> appending or resolving a bug clash in reasonable ways.
> 
> Any interest? Any thoughts?

There's Bugs Everywhere (which works with bzr and Arch).

<http://www.panoramicfeedback.com/opensource/index.html>

I've never used it, so I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems
you use a "be" command, similar to your "hg bugs" example.

You can see the .be directory it uses in this project's code browser:

<http://codebrowse.launchpad.net/~aaron-bentley/bzrtools/bzrtools.dev/files>

If you like it, perhaps hg support could be added.
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