Bug and issue tracking on the forums

[Guest]

Greeeeetings,

the sheep is just doing some stuff to the forums and thought about the following:

Currently we have our issue tracker running on Lighthouse, along with our Bug'>http://http://getmangos.eu/community/viewforum.php?id=18']Bug Reports forum, a complete Patches sub-forum.

Should we change anything about it?

[xnxx10]

i'm first and yes, im for bug track on forum we will see all on one place

[Janu]

Hmm, I do not think that is a good idea. It is quite difficult to keep the overview of the bugs and tools like Lighthouse or Mantis were created for keeping this overview a bit easier

So make life a bit easier for the Devs and keep Lighthouse

[Toinan67]

Afaik, the lighthouse bugtracker is a bit "dead". The thing is that we cannot properly discuss the code in a bugtracker...

As Janu said, devs' life would be easier with a nice bugtracking tool, but threads in bug reports are often a place of debates and discussion, which is not the real purpose of a bugtracker (imo).

[DasBlub]

i prefer a 'real' bugtracker like lighthouse as it has workflows (assigning tickets to someone, 'in work', 'waiting for answer', etc.) and is better to search it. furthermore lighthouse has less spam because you need to register on it and can't use your forum-account from here.

i haven't used the github issues yet, but it looks really nice and would be useful as those who are working on mangos either way already have a github account (well, many of them) so they can use that account.

but in the end, the devs have to decide, they need to work with it all the time

[TheLuda]

Well, that is why I am asking. Bug reports and patch submissions are probably the most active places, and since people rather discuss bugs and patches, I considered a forum integrated bug tracker as it would have both combined and require less looking around.

[fdb_]

I fully agree with DasBlub.

But I am affraid to use a poor (even if it is practical) bugtracker. In my mind a bugtracker will ease a lot of work but many of public facilities giving access to a bugtracker does not implement workflows, categorization or a good search engine...

The lack of those features can be a pain to comunicate, exchange and find the right information for most of people.

My 2 cents.

[TheLuda]

Which is why most people use forums for bug reports instead of trackers?

[Schmoozerd]

a big difference is, what kind of bug you want to report:

Reporting something like

Spell xyz is broken in rev zyx

is better handled in a bugtracker,

but reporting something like

Hello,

In rev 10456, I had a new error in the console :

ACE_SV_Semaphore_Complex : No space left on Device. In fact, when I put ipcs on linux, I see loads of semaphores. With a earlier version in another machine, there is no lasting semaphore at all.

I try to delete them, when the server starts, it comes again.

Any idea ?

clerarly adresses not only devs but also many users for some input, discussion etc, so this kind of 'problem' is better reported in an environement where it can be discussed

So - as long as the Devs accept both systems, I think it is better to have both.

Of course it might be a cool thing if the Lighthouse tracker would be more integrated (especially search) into the forum (with same functionality)

[Patman128]

Not the forum, please. A bug tracker that forces users to use the bug tracker format (mangos rev., SD2 rev., platform, etc.) would be nice, so we don't get more crap bug reports, but I think in general the quality of the bug reports in general is pretty low here. There just isn't much useful information in them.

There are much better/more organized/more fully-featured bug tracking software out there besides a forum. When you open the bug reports forum, it's just a mess. You can't tell what are open, what are closed, if the rev # is when the bug was reported or when it was fixed, etc.

If you do end up going with the forum, at very least please make at least 3 sub-forums: the good (closed reports) the bad (open reports) and the ugly (bad/invalid reports) and give a few more of us the ability to edit and sort out the reports into their respective forums so the developers here don't have to deal with being bombarded by bad reports.

[freghar]

Not the forum, please. A bug tracker that forces users to use the bug tracker format (mangos rev., SD2 rev., platform, etc.) would be nice, so we don't get more crap bug reports, but I think in general the quality of the bug reports in general is pretty low here. There just isn't much useful information in them.

There are much better/more organized/more fully-featured bug tracking software out there besides a forum. When you open the bug reports forum, it's just a mess. You can't tell what are open, what are closed, if the rev # is when the bug was reported or when it was fixed, etc.

If you do end up going with the forum, at very least please make at least 3 sub-forums: the good (closed reports) the bad (open reports) and the ugly (bad/invalid reports) and give a few more of us the ability to edit and sort out the reports into their respective forums so the developers here don't have to deal with being bombarded by bad reports.

I guess he meant some kind of a forum plug-in, like other vBulletin forums have. There can be all the fields you define as mandatory, like revision, category, ...

I'm for it. It won't be like a "real" bugtracker, but it'll be accessible to a lot more people.

edit: oh, this wasn't the original idea, but it looks like a suitable compromise to me

[TheLuda]

I guess he meant some kind of a forum plug-in, like other vBulletin forums have. There can be all the fields you define as mandatory, like revision, category, ...

Actually yes, I was considering a forum plugin that provides bug tracking inside these boards. You could actually turn the bug reports section into a real bug tracker with revision, etc. and change the patch submission section to tickets, too.

Somewhere along those lines it would work.

[shyhawk]

Any successful project has a way of tracking fixes. My suggestion is to have a tracking system, keep it simple like just the spell name or the quest name. Then use the bug reports section of the forums for the developers to ask questions about the bug, then when the bug is fixed it can be updated on the tracking form and the post can be removed by the developer that asked the question. This not only would help keep the devs more organized but also would keep the forums cleaner for people to find things they need.

Just my opinion.

[TheLuda]

Obviously there is no perfect solution to tracking issues for open source projects. I've been using quite a few commercial and free tools over the last few years, including a few enterprise solutions at work, and man... nothing really suits well.

I guess in our case, a forum / issue tracking hybrid would not hurt. As we have seen over the last five years, the bug report and patches sections are pretty much the places to be when it comes to reporting and fixing issues.

While I personally do prefer discussions and issues on different tools, for mangos a combination smells better.

Anyway, I'd love to hear more opinions, and probably - in case someone of you has used on of the forum issue trackers like IP.Tracker, etc. - even read a bit of your experience with those tools.

[DaemonCantor]

As I remember at work we used to use a comanation of calander/forum tracker/scheduler solution from Intel but that was probably expensive and too much for here, but with so many brilliant minds floating around couldn't you get a custom thingy programed up just for this? also it might be something others wan't and could potentially offset your hosting bill as well.