I've been doing this project for a few weeks now and I think it's time to
evaluate where I want to take it. You all have had a chance to see what
I've done and to judge whether it is useful or not. I've been doing it as
a startup demonstration to see if it was useful and whether I could do it.
I'm fairly certain I can do it -- whether it is worth it is up to you all.
When I announced the project it was in response to informal exchanges with
some of the major developers. I had initially considered a bugzilla-type
of project, but there were some drawbacks. Bugzilla appears to have the
capabilities I'm looking for, but I have/had some concerns. My aim is to
provide the kind of reporting, in an expanded form and format more readily
accessible. The problem is that I don't want to get in the way; I don't
want the developers to have to go through extra effort, and I don't want
the users reporting bugs to be required to go through extra effort to
support this.
My current approach has some drawbacks. I need to be able to associate
messages in different threads with the same problem. I need to be able to
associate one message with several problems. I need to be able to better
track the status of fixes. I know bugzilla can do all this, I just need
to figure out whether I can set it up so I can do it without requiring a
lot of extra work for users and developers. If I can't, then it isn't as
useful as it could be.
I'm going to spend this weekend looking at bugzilla and learning it. I
want to be able to create a problem tracking report and dump relevant
messages from my kernel mailing queues into the database associated with
that report. I want to be able to associate a developer with each problem
report group and track the status of fixes for the problem. I want to be
able to create reports for the mailing list from that database, as well as
making it available online.
In the meantime, if I could get feedback on what I've been doing so far,
whether what I've outlined is what you might expect, and any other
suggestions you might have. I was initially offered space on sourceforge.
I'm assuming that offer is still good; if the feedback I get indicates I
should go in the direction I've outlined, I'll contact them and set it up
there.
Thanks in advance for your attention.
Tom