On 4.4.2012, at 10.31, Γεώργιος Δεδούσης wrote: > Wietse, please comment, don't you think that a public repo, showing each > source code change would be useful for Postfix? An issue reporting system too?
Issue trackers seem to be kind of a waste of time for projects with few developers: a) You get non-issues reported, which get simply resolved as NOTABUG. If it was reported in mailing list other people might have answered to it quickly and without spending the actual developers' time. Note that very few people besides the developers bother to read what happens in issue tracker, while there are a lot of people reading and answering mailing lists. b) Similarly some feature requests could be resolved with much less trouble on mailing list than in issue tracker. Even good ideas might become better with some mailing list discussion. c) Important bugs usually get fixed quickly in any case, so an issue tracker isn't very useful for them. d) Non-reproducible bugs often clutter the issue tracker. (These may not be real bugs at all.) e) Features requests wanted by about 1 person in the world often clutter the issue tracker. (I have added many of them to many bugzillas, nobody ever closes them and I doubt anyone will every implement them.) So the only useful issues for a tracker would be the ones that are important enough to get fixed/implemented when there's time, but not important enough that they actually bother all that many people. Those can be tracked manually in whatever way without much trouble. I've had some thoughts about integrating an issue tracker with a mailing list, but it hasn't advanced beyond the idea stage. http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-January/018786.html describes the idea in case someone is interested in developing it (I think there are some more details somewhere else in the mailing list as well). One interesting aspect of it is that it wouldn't necessarily require the primary developers to use it at all.
