Hi Nico,

It's a shame that the effort did not gain more traction in 2004. I wonder
if things would look differently now as the community has grown
significantly larger?

It does seem like there are a relatively small number of bug-related
questions on the mailing lists. I wonder though if this could be in part
because some people may be hesitant to ask their questions on such a large
list, and instead end up either forgoing the question or contacting the
software authors directly?

Also, even if there is only a trickle of bug and feature-request related
posts to the mailing list across time, without any way to keep track of how
many of those issues are open/unresolved, it's hard to gauge whether the
project really is low-maintenance, or if there are actually a large number
of issues that have just been unanswered or forgotten.

There would definitely be a burden associated with setting up a more
sophisticated system for dealing with bugs. I am just not convinced that
the burden would be too great, or that it is not worth taking on :)

Cheers,
Keith


On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Nicolas Delhomme
<nicolas.delhomme@umu.se>wrote:

> Hej Keith!
>
> I agree that this would be useful. For having been very close to the 2004
> attempt - a then colleague of mine set up a solution similar to what you
> describe - I can tell you that the main reason for it dying out was that
> despite advertising it, it never got widely used. I don’t know what the
> reasons for that really were, but from experience I know that many fellow
> bioinformaticians find such tools more time-consuming than  handling bug
> tracking through emails. And after all very few packages require frequent
> support, as can be devised from questions to the mailing list, so I do
> understand their point.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Nico
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Nicolas Delhomme
>
> The Street Lab
> Department of Plant Physiology
> Umeå Plant Science Center
>
> Tel: +46 90 786 5478
> Email: nicolas.delhomme@plantphys.umu.se
> SLU - Umeå universitet
> Umeå S-901 87 Sweden
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 20 May 2014, at 15:04, Keith Hughitt <keith.hughitt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I was wondering if there had been any progress towards adopting a bug
> > tracking system for Bioconductor?
> >
> > It has been discussed at least a couple times in the past, e.g.:
> >
> >    - https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2011-October/002844.html
> >    - https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2004-October/000040.html
> >
> > But as far as I can tell, no such system has been set up and the current
> > approach is to report issues to the mailing list.
> >
> > The main reasons I see for adopting such a system would be:
> >
> > 1. Centralized location for reporting and tracking bugs and feature
> > requests; this also makes it more straight-forward to see if anyone else
> > has already reported a specific issue.
> >
> > 2. Ability to associate a given issue with specific a project
> >
> > 3. Ability to assign priorities to various issues and assign developers
> to
> > work on them.
> >
> > 4. Easy to track changes made to a given release.
> >
> > 5. Separate usage and development discussion (mailing list) for
> > issue-related discussion.
> >
> > Something like trac <http://trac.edgewall.org/> would be sufficient to
> > cover all of the above issues, although something with closer integration
> > to the codebase such as Github <https://github.com/> or
> > Bitbucket<https://bitbucket.org/>might provide some additional
> > benefits. Of course, migrating to a separate
> > VCS not a trivial matter and would itself merit a separate discussion.
> >
> > A couple examples of issue trackers working well for R projects:
> >
> >    https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/issues
> >    https://github.com/yihui/knitr
> >
> > Thank you all for your excellent work on Bioconductor! It is a really
> > amazing resource.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Keith
> >
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>
>

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