Hi, Thank you all for the great work you do for PHP! I would like to raise a concern regarding the usefulness of the current PHP issue tracker - bugs.php.net.
tl;dr In my opinion: Current bug tracker is terrible. Moving to a better/modern bug tracker should be a high priority of the PHP community. I'm presenting a PHP user/reporter point of view, I'm not much into developing PHP interpreter itself. However often I have to use bugs.php.net when debugging issues or checking security reports. In the 1-10 scale I give bugs.php.net grade "2", meaning it's almost not usable. Issues I have: - the UI is terrible (not useful, confusing, misleading) - it's really hard to find what person is looking for - data quality is low (many duplicated reports, lot of old reports cluttering the list, information gathered is not reliable) - the tool blocks community in helping managing the issue list and triaging bugs - Its not possible to log in, be notified when sth change on issues I'm interested in (created, commented, voted or just watching) Examples: - Its not possible to link issues which are related/duplicated (when you're not power user) - its not possible to state PHP version or OS you're reproducing the issue in - the search is not indexing comments (so the place where most important information is stored) - some actions like trying to edit an issue don't always return a result/information/feedback to the user, and once they do it's not helpful e.g. "The password you supplied was incorrect." -> what is the password all about? where do I get it? how can I get it back once I forgot? - voting has some radio buttons selected by default, so I'm sure many users just submits wrong data, because they just want to vote and haven't check e.g. OS radio. - I can't change the voting once it's done - The "Same OS" stats are not really helpful, it doesn't even help to know whether it's windows only issue or also linux related, it's not really possible to filter issues related to some system - there are still open issues for long not supported versions like 4 or 5, and you never know whether they are still valid because nobody updates the affected versions. You need to go inside to see activity and maybe you'll deduce sth from it. - there are tons of stale issues even from over 10 years ago. With better issue tracker people from community would be able to help triaging these bugs, confirming them, setting correct statuses, finding duplicates and so There are of course many more, I haven't even started with UX ;) To make the discussion constructive please answer following question first, before we jump into details. 1. Do you agree that current issue tracker needs a change, or it's ok for you? 2. Do you consider that it's important and high priority to have a better, more collaborative tool there? 3. As stated on twitter (https://twitter.com/official_php/status/1024658601770668033 ) there are some specific needs which make the move to different tool harder. What are they? Cheers Tymoteusz -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
