[Rd] Bug reporting system inquiry plus a bug report related to sort

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mar 4, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Jens Elkner wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 09:39:41AM -0600, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> 
>> There has been talk over the years of moving to Bugzilla, but I am not clear on present status.
> 
> IMHO Bugzilla is too challenging for normal users/human beeings (even
> developers are often not able to extract the info they need). So JIRA
> (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) might be a much better choice -
> usually it is not a problem to ask for and get a license for free for
> OpenSource projects ...

Jira was discussed a couple of years ago:

  http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e5/devel/08/09/0006.html

I presume that the disposition towards non-FOSS platforms remains.

FWIW, the company that I work for uses Bugzilla (and SVN) on RHEL for our own internal development and bug/issue reporting processes. We have both clients and employees using our Bugzilla platform.

The key to having a successful result is not the software, but that the end users and developers can interact with a base of information that enables productive conversation. That places a certain burden on those reporting the bugs/issues to understand both when and how to report bugs, including providing sufficient information on the platform, versions, code and data to reliably reproduce the issue observed.

As we frequently see on both R-Help and R-Devel, in my mind, that is the limiting characteristic. With bug.report(), we still have issues and that is arguably independent of the host bug management system.

I would argue that if there was a somewhat bigger hurdle in place to bug reporting that compelled folks to post to R-Help first, before filing a formal bug report, that this would not be a bad outcome. Whatever the host system may be, a member of R Core will still need to manually process the report, adding to their overhead. Reducing the number of false positives would be helpful.

Marc