Re: What issue tracker to use?

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 02:12:35PM -0400, Martijn Pieters wrote:

> Are there any plans for another issue tracker for development elsewhere? If
> not I can prolly set up a Zope CMF Collector (as seen on collector.zope.org,
> for example). SourceForge is another option, although I see John does all
> his project hosting on his own servers. :)

You are quite right on many counts.  I did not expect this project to
achieve the interest it has.  I wrote OfflineIMAP originally because I have
been really ticked off at mail readers for years, and didn't want to write a
new one from scratch, but still wanted to fix the problem.  Apparently many
others have also been ticked off right alongside me :-)

So please excuse my slow start on these things.

I do not host anything on SourceForge because I believe it is already a way
too big "single point of failure" for the Free Software community and
therefore I refuse to help it :-)  Not to mention that it provides less
flexibility with some things, and has some terms & conditions that can be
onerous at times.  I want the software I write to be now and forever Free,
dammit, so I'm not going to put it anywhere that could in any way weaken the
rights granted to people under the GPL.  (Read this paragraph with some
patriotic revolutionary music in the background <grin>)

Along with my "all mail readers suck" opinion, I also believe that "all
bug-tracking systems suck", and that life without a BTS at all simply sucks
more.  

My general requirements for a BTS are:
1. Bugs be manipulatable via e-mail;
2. Bugs should be able to be assigned to specific people;
3. Plain-text, free-form reports should be receivable via e-mail;
4. a web-based front-end;
5. security is important.

Unfortunately, there is no BTS that meets all my criteria.  I have used
GNATS before, which works, but fails on #5.  Jitterbug is another
possibility, which fails #1.  I have not followed it recently, but it may be
better than it was.  I could also set up a localized version of the Debian
BTS.  (Incidentally, the Debian BTS also fails on #5; any member of the
public can manipulate any bug report.  In fact, we have had trouble with bug
reports getting closed by spam recently.)

> Advantage of using a CMF setup is that I can also add a CMF Wiki, which
> would allow us to collaborate on design docs such as might be needed if we'd
> collectively were to develop a new IMAP library..

I do run Zope on www.complete.org; if there's e-mail manipulation support
with that product, I would be happy to install & set it up.

-- John