Out of sight out of mind

Jeremy DeHaan via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jun 15 12:07:01 PDT 2014


On Sunday, 15 June 2014 at 15:37:22 UTC, Andrew Edwards wrote:
> Observe the following truths:
>     1) Issue tricking and resolution are kept separate in our 
> community
>     2) That which is not visible garners no attention
>
> Presently, we file bugs/issues through issues.dlang.org, the 
> maintenance of which is no small task and is certainly 
> appreciated. However, it is an environment completely detached 
> from where the actual work is performed. As such, it breeds 
> neglect on the part of the developers: not because they do not 
> care, but rather because they do not see.
>
> Take issue #143 for instance. It is the oldest open issue on 
> the DLang Issue Tracking System. Submitted by Jarrett 
> Billingsley on May 17, 2006, it received one comment two days 
> later but was ignored for four years before Michal Minich made 
> the second comment. Another two years went by before Martin 
> Nowak addressed the issue, which Walter promptly reverted 
> (reason unknown). The end result? Eight years flew by and the 
> issue remains unresolved.
>
> This happens because we have two separate systems (one tracking 
> problems, another tracking the resolution), both of which 
> compete for the same precious and extremely limited resource: 
> the volunteer time of developers.
>
> Already proven a valuable resource, GitHub offers the tools 
> necessary to resolve this problem. The "issues" feature (not 
> currently activated for any D-Programming-Language repo) allows 
> us to set milestones (with due dates), assign tasks, and create 
> and apply labels (multiple where required).
>
> Observe the following:
>
> 	https://github.com/AndrewEdwards/druntime/issues?state=open
>
> Note how quickly you can see the total number of open issues, 
> traverse to any category, and identify what is important for a 
> given milestone. We can even track our progress toward a 
> specific milestone in seconds, or which issues we created or 
> was assigned to us.
>
> By using this feature, we will eliminate the fire and forget 
> problem currently observed with Bugzilla. We will be able to 
> automatically link resolution to issue, by a mere mention of 
> the issue number within the resolution. Issues become far more 
> visible and, consequently, are not so easily forgotten.
>
> A complete win in my book.
>
> -Andrew

I agree with this quite a lot. If for nothing else, I agree with
this because I think it makes the most sense to have the place we
do pull requests be the same place we track issues. There are a
few other reasons I agree with this, but the point is that I
would very much like to see this happen.


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