OT: Distributed bug tracking?

[Dmitriy Morozov]

Hi, Paul (and the rest of the Mercurial mailing list),

Just before the New Year I started writing pretty much exactly what
you described in your email (I've been wanting a system like this for
a while, and finally realized that implementing it as an extension is
the easiest way to go). It's very preliminary at the moment, but it
does all of the things you described in the original email. The main
things missing are adding file attachments, integration with commit,
and integration with hgweb (I don't know how feasible the last one
is).

What you called hg bug open, I called hg iadd; hg bug append <bug-id>,
I called hg iadd <bug-id>, or hg iadd <bug-id> <comment-id> (it allows
for threading of messages); hg bug resolve <state> is hg iupdate
<bug-id> -p property=value (e.g., -p state=fixed); hg bug report
<option>, I called hg ilist -p property=value or -f filtername (to
list those issues that match some requirements given explicitly on
command line, or in a pre-defined filter); plus there is hg ishow
<bug-id> [comment-id] to actually view the issues (or comments to
them).

The issues are stored in files in hgroot/.issues directory. Each issue
is its own file in mbox format (so in particular you can open it in,
say, mutt and still read all the contents). The properties (e.g.,
State) are simply stored as message headers. Merging is trivial,
although requires manual involvement if there are conflicts. It sounds
like a good idea to consider storing comments in separate files (I
guess storing issues in Maildir format instead of mbox format) which
should get rid of the manual merging if there are updates in different
branches.

Anyway, I called the extension Artemis, you can clone a copy from
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~morozov/repos/Artemis/

The next thing I'll implement (when I have time again is ability to
attach files to comments and the issues themselves).

Let me know what you think.

Best,
Dmitriy

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?