OT: Distributed bug tracking?

[Jens Alfke]

On 2 Jan '08, at 12:32 PM, Paul Sargent wrote:

> 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.

This is a great idea. I've daydreamed about the possibility of using  
hg as the backing store for a wiki, which is somewhat similar.

I suspect that the bugs might need to live in a separate repository  
from the source, though:

* The access control is likely to be so different (the set of people  
who can file bug reports is much larger than the set of those who can  
commit fixes)
* It could get awkward to propagate bug reports between branches,  
especially since they tend to flow in the opposite direction that  
source changes do (originating in releases, but needing to move to  
development branches to be fixed.)

> 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.

A directory per bug report would leave room for attachments (test  
cases, screenshots), which are pretty important to support. E.g.:
	/bugs/123456/index.bugreport
	/bugs/123456/testcase.xml
	/bugs/123456/erroralert.jpg

> I think you might need some special merge logic, so that two people
> appending or resolving a bug clash in reasonable ways.

Yes. In particular, a lot of the activity in a bug report takes the  
form of comments, which can be merged simply by appending both  
conflicting new entries.
The new FeedSync format (an RSS/Atom extension that allows feeds to be  
updated independently and then merged and reconciled) might be useful  
for such a purpose:
	http://dev.live.com/feedsync/default.aspx
If a bug report were formatted as an Atom feed with FeedSync  
extensions, it would be straightforward to merge together two modified  
versions of it.

--Jens