[arch-general] distributed bugtracking?

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Philipp Überbacher
<hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Dieter Plaetinck's message of 2010-09-08 21:47:40 +0200:
>> anyone knows this? http://bugseverywhere.org/be/show/HomePage
>>
>> the concept looks great, although i don't know anything about the
>> implementation/usage.
>>
>> other then the advantages they list, I think something like this can be
>> useful for downstream<->upstream communication. (ie someone reports a
>> bug in the distro bugseverywhere, they can then more easily forward the
>> bugs to upstream when needed)
>> i blogged about stuff like this @
>> http://dieter.plaetinck.be/what_the_open_source_community_can_learn_from_devops
>> if anyone cares.
>>
>> Dieter
>
> Hi Dieter,
> just another distributed bug tracking system:
> http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki
>
> It's also a DVCS and whatnot. What I wonder about is how it compares to
> git when it comes to the DVCS part.

i don't anything too valuable to add, except that i too have written
about this concept, notably here:

Distrib -e "Arch(org|code|pkgs|aur|forum|wiki|bugs|.*)?" -- thoughts
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=709188

i think this is the _primary_ barrier affecting uptake of linux/GNU as
a mainstream platform.  we have all the source, and all the talent,
but the heterogeneous nature of OSS (great, but a barrier nonetheless)
means we are all using varied and incompatible tools to track/build
the same upstreams.  we need some unification here, not just for
users, but vendors/developers too; such disconnects are a source of
serious confusion and duplication of work.

i think this, regardless of chosen software, would be a huge step
forward.  while i haven't released a prototype yet, i am attempting to
realize this with work being done on aur-pyjs
(https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=99839); my "cover" is a
replacement for the AUR, but the real motivation behind this project
is to build a distribution agnostic platform, a "framework for
building linux distributions" if you will.  we need to take sources,
packages, bugs, software channels (vendors/distributions), and
communication (forums/wiki/ML-ish) to the P2P/distributed space, so
that all these exobytes of resources can be shared by _all_
communities.  DSCM can solve nearly all these problems, including
cryptographic verification of origin and identity.  specifically, i
want to rid ourselves of the notions of versions and packages, and
instead move to a "tracking" scheme, ie. aggressive tracking =
following HEAD/trunk, stable tracking = following certain tags.  we
need to eliminate the overhead in packaging, and manual cherry-picking
of appropriate versions; i have many specific ideas here, but i don't
want to digress too much :-)

i wish i had something more tangible to share, but i'm in a bit of a
financial crunch, and have only implemented bits and pieces; it is not
demo-able yet.  however, i am highly motivated to induce/propagate
this paradigm shift, so i am responding to encourage everyone to think
beyond what is now, and tune your cognitive abilities toward these
alternative possibilities.

closing the gaps between user/author/vendor/developer/support/etc.
means more rapid, consistent, and _transparent_ progression of the
entire ecosystem.

C Anthony