[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#16811) Issue tracking system for Freeciv

["Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa" <vasco.costa@xxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=16811 >

On 5/2/06, Kevin Benton <s1kevin@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Kevin,

> <URL: http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=16811 >
>
> RT as configured is a royal pain to use.  One of the reasons for the
> difficulty is the basic design of RT.  As a Bugzilla developer, I think

Why is RT, as configured, a royal pain to use?
What is the problem with the basic design of RT?

> this group would benefit greatly by switching from RT to Bugzilla.  It

We used to use Jitterbug years ago. Then we wanted to switch to
something which did more.

At the time, we evaluated Bugzilla, RT, Mantis and some others. At the
time, Bugzilla and RT seemed the best candidates, RT being easier to
use (e.g. searching a bug in Bugzilla presented you with a bewildering
interface laden with widgets). Mantis was nice but seemed to be less
battle tested.

At the time, a newbie got lost in the Bugzilla interface quick (at
least I did). Then there is that Zarro boogs found thing. I guess it
sounds really funny. For a native english speaker. Unfortunately not
all of us are native english speakers and such puns often get lost in
translation.

So we upgraded from Jitterbug to RT and there was much rejoicement. Of
course RT looked better than Bugzilla before our RT bug database got a
bazillion tickets and things like searching, or worse, adding a user
to a group got s-l-o-w.

Bugzilla does seem to scale *much* better than RT.

Actually, even RT would probably be faster if we upgraded it. Unfortunately:

1) We customized the RT configuration to a point where a simple upgrade is hard.
2) The box hosting the RT bugtracker uses an old Linux distro and
upgrading that box is not very easy given our physical access to the
box is cumbersome, to say the least.

> make it easier for those of us who use FreeCiv to search bugs before
> filing one, and more importantly, it would make it easier for those of
> us who want to contribute, to research where things are today.  I think
> it makes a lot of sense since Bugzilla is also an open source project
> designed specifically to support projects like this.  To learn more
> about Bugzilla, see http://www.bugzilla.org/.

Let us say we wanted to transition to Bugzilla. We would like to port
over our existing RT bugs database so we wouldn't lose the history. If
that is possible, in a way which does not force us do a lot of work
(hey, I'm lazy), we will consider porting the bugs database to
Bugzilla.

Thank you for contributing,

--
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa