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

[Marc Schwartz]

Thanks for the update and your work on this Simon.

Regards,

Marc

On Mar 4, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

> Just to calm the discussion a bit - we already have decided to go with Bugzilla, we created tools for the import of old PRs and the new bug system is up and running in a test phase. The current downtime is not directly related to that - the cause is being investigated.
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon
> 
> 
> On Mar 4, 2010, at 11:58 , Marc Schwartz wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 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