Bug tracking

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Pratyush,

In message <20210325193843.qniaryw2xxgkzqjf at ti.com> you wrote:
>
> You would need people to maintain the bugs that are reported in the 
> tracker. Asking for clear, reproducible info, closing duplicates or old 
> bugs, etc. Then you need people dedicated to fixing those bugs. Sure, 
> some can be taken up by subsystem maintainers or active devs, but what 
> to do with the ones that aren't?
>
> My point is, having a bug tracker needs volunteers to help maintain it. 
> Otherwise it would not be very useful and important bugs would get 
> drowned in the noise or be left stale. We can experiment with it but we 
> need to keep in mind the extra effort required.

I think it is worth to start such an experiment.  Eventually there
are people out there who don;t have experience, time and resources
for bigger development tasks, but who might help out with smaller
tasks like bug fixing.

> > Another option is to use source.denx.de but that would require
> > allowing anyone to register so is probably a non-starter.
>
> Honestly, source.denx.de makes the most sense to me. I would expect the 
> Gitlab instance where the repo is hosted to also be where the bug 
> tracker is hosted. Makes it much easier to find.

I fully agree here; this is also my suggestion.

> But if allowing anyone to register is a no-go, then I would prefer 
> something decentralized/non-proprietary to keep the project independent 
> of the host. But people generally aren't very enthusiastic about those 
> because the proprietary solutions are just so easy to use...

It is not a strict no-go, but we will have to think about some form
of rate limiting - either in form of approvals (which would add to
our work load) or allowing only OAUTH logins from other platforms as
it's done for example here [1].

[1]  https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in

And we should make sure that only bugs against mainline versions can
be reported - it makes no sense to collect bug information for
out-of-tree code where we might not even have access to.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,      Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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