Re: Cygwin bug tracking is non-existent

[Thomas Schweikle <tschweikle at gmail dot com>]

From: Reini Urban <rurban at x-ray dot at>
References: <4C286CD7.6040707@blunn.org>
> 2010/6/28 William Blunn:
>> Cygwin does not appear to have a bug tracker.
>>
>> That being the case:
>>
>> How do we keep all information about a bug together in one referenceable
>> place?
>
> You did the right thing. You reported the bug to cygwin@cygwin.com
> which is tracked by email and by an archive on the webpage.
> See http://cygwin.com/problems.html
>
>> How do we keep a bug around and tracked through to completion?
>
> By email.
>
>> i.e. How do we do the things that every other project uses a bug tracker
>> for?
>>
>> Seems like every open source project has a bug tracker.
>
> Not really. postgresql i.e uses the same type of bug tracking.

Used even if the bug tracker is not public. They changed mind, because
of various reasons. Can you tell how many bugs are open? Quite not.
Mail isn't useful for such cases. Is a bug reported multiple? Same.
Does a bug belong to an other bug? Quite difficult to tell.
The interface to the public is mail. The bug tracker itself is not
exposed to public.

>> The various open source foundries seem to provide that as standard.
>>
>> But no bug tracker for Cygwin.
>
> Sending email to cygwin at cygwin.com IS the right bug tracking method.
> The archives are online at http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/
> Response is immediate.

Hmmmmmmmm! Immediate? XWin not starting any more for now about six
months ... no fix available. Searching the list does not lead to
anything working. Most of the threads just go asleep. No solution to
this bug can be found. Some threads are just user errors. Some went
asleep. Months later: this bug is alive and well. Fixes? None.
Can you tell how many people are suffering from this bug? Maybe.
Counting mail send from a variety of different people isn't easy.
A bugtracker would allow for such: counting people suffering from
bugs, counting people reporting the same bug, marking bugs as
duplicate of an other, relating bugs to other bugs. Counting overall
bugs reported and actively worked on. And another: it would allow to
relate bugs found in cygwin to bugs found on any unix/linux platform.
Maybe a fix for CentOS/Fedora/Ubuntu/openSUSE/Gentoo even
Free/Net/OpenBSD might help fix something in cygwin. At the moment?
Quite difficult to tell if a bug is cygwin specific or not. Maybe even
some bugs found within cygwin are "features", not bugs, because of the
underling OS!

>> Consider this a bug report against the Cygwin project.
>
> Looks like an invalid report.

Not really. An enhancement.

>> I'd report it as a bug on the bug tracker, but we appear to have a catch-22
>> / bootstrapping problem...

Since cygwin is a redhat project (not quite sure) wouldn't it be
possible to use the existing redhat bugtracker?

-- 
Thomas

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