[darcs-users] recent issue maintenance + preparing transition to darcsden

[Guillaume Hoffmann]

Hi,

yesterday I applied the process described at
http://darcs.net/BugTracker , in particular I used the "Maintenance"
query to go through all open tickets, from oldest to newest. In total
there were more than 560 open tickets. Now they are "only" 240 (see
https://tinyurl.com/y95a3u6x ).

I closed a lot of tickets using the "given-up" status. Mostly, I closed:

* bugs related to parts of the code that have been refactored at some
point (cache system, packs, flags, repo cloning, etc.).
* bugs related to features that no longer exist.
* old bugs related to non-linux platform (eg Darcs failure on Windows
Vista, etc.)
* tickets that express wishes for Darcs 3

Nothing I did is definitive, if someone finds I closed an interesting
issue, please open it again.

Now, I found that for our current pace of development, the bug tracker
is too complicated. I'm not sure some fields are useful at all (see
below). An issue system that uses tags would simplify the whole thing
IMHO.

We already discussed the possibility of moving all darcs hosting and
development to hub.darcs.net ; I still think it is a good idea, we
could then freeze bugs.darcs.net and still be able to refer to old
discussions.

IIRC the most problematic topic was adapting patch submission to
darcsden.  We still need developer effort to solve this and discuss
whether use a pull-request workflow or patch bundles.

In the meantime, I suggest the following concrete steps to simplify
the current issue and patch tracker:

* remove the Priority, Milestone and Assigned-To fields of issue
tickets and patch bundles
* reduce the Status options of issues to:
    * open (ex-unknown, waiting-for, needs-*, in-progress)
    * given-up (ex:given-up, duplicate,wontfix, deferred)
    * resolved.
    * Note: when exporting issues to darcsden, change given-up and
resolved to closed.

I know nothing about the issue/bug tracker but if Ganesh agrees I can
try and implement these changes.

Guillaume