bugs that have not been replied-to on list

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

BUG #5287: ispell dict erroneously returns lexeme on all prefix+suffix
cross products
BUG #5300: Bug on Mac OS X 10.6 and Postgres 8.4
BUG #5316: not handled error in inherit queries
BUG #5335: GUC value lost on exception
BUG #4785: Installation fails

I responded to that one:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-05/msg00002.php

BUG #5337: PostgreSQL install fails with 1603 error

That's a PG 8.2/MSI issue, which is why none of the EDB guys
responded. My own excuse is that I'm not the only guy that worked on
the MSI installer, and I simply don't have time to respond to every
problem reported.

BUG #4806: Bug with GiST index and empty integer array?
BUG #4769: xmlconcat produces invalid xml values -> data corruption
BUG #5379: Adding hunspell-ko dictionary for full-text search doesn't work
BUG #5405: Consol and utf8

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:43 AM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

BUG #5287: ispell dict erroneously returns lexeme on all prefix+suffix
cross products
BUG #5300: Bug on Mac OS X 10.6 and Postgres 8.4
BUG #5316: not handled error in inherit queries
BUG #5335: GUC value lost on exception
BUG #4785: Installation fails

I responded to that one:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-05/msg00002.php

!!!!! I never got that email message. Something is wrong with this
mailing list. In the case of the email that started this discussion,
you never saw the original email message, and in this case, I never
saw your reply. That's bad.

BUG #5337: PostgreSQL install fails with 1603 error

That's a PG 8.2/MSI issue, which is why none of the EDB guys
responded. My own excuse is that I'm not the only guy that worked on
the MSI installer, and I simply don't have time to respond to every
problem reported.

BUG #4806: Bug with GiST index and empty integer array?
BUG #4769: xmlconcat produces invalid xml values -> data corruption
BUG #5379: Adding hunspell-ko dictionary for full-text search doesn't work
BUG #5405: Consol and utf8

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

You know, I never really thought we did before, but I had the same
thought last night. One of the problems with "don't worry about what
product it is, just post here" is that it only works if people from
all of those products regularly monitor this list, which in turn
requires them to skip over the issues with all the other products that
they don't know or care about. An actual bug-tracking system would
let us classify bugs by product, which would in theory help with this
problem. Even consider ecpg. It's part of core PostgreSQL, so
undeniably on topic for this list, but it's asking a lot for Michael
Meskes to read everything that goes by on this list just to catch the
2 or 3 ecpg problems that get reported each year.

Of course, if the people working on those projects don't monitor the
bug-tracking system, then we'll have the same problem with
non-response that we do today - maybe worse, since at least now we can
refer people who don't get an answer to another forum. Another problem
is that any solution we picked would have to be acceptable to the
people who do actively monitor this list. It would be bad if changing
to a different system resulted in bugs getting less attention. But
practically speaking, I'd guess there's less than 20 people who
respond to most of the traffic on -bugs, so if we find a solution that
those people like, we'd be better off.

We'd also have fewer problems with things slipping through the cracks.
Things might still get ignored, but at least the system would be
keeping track of that instead of Bruce and I. Momjzilla/Haaszilla has
a catchy ring to it but it's not a very efficient way to run a
project.

...Robert

On Apr 9, 2010, at 5:08 AM, Robert Haas wrote:

Something is wrong with this
mailing list.

In the week and a half that I've been subscribed to this mailing list, there have been several times that I received a reply to a message without receiving the original message. In most cases, I received the original message a few minutes to a few hours later. I haven't watched other people's issues closely enough to tell if I'm missing any messages completely. But I can see why people need to use such long Cc: lists on their posts.

Andy Balholm <andy@balholm.com> wrote:

On Apr 9, 2010, at 5:08 AM, Robert Haas wrote:

Something is wrong with this mailing list.

In the week and a half that I've been subscribed to this mailing
list, there have been several times that I received a reply to a
message without receiving the original message. In most cases, I
received the original message a few minutes to a few hours later.

I've seen that sometimes, too. It's usually preceded by an eerie
"calm" without many (or any) messages. I don't know whether the
bottleneck is on our end (the emails go through many anti-spam
filters before they reach me, and I know they sometimes fall
behind).

The other issue which has caused me to see replies to messages I
missed is that some of the posters here are going through SMTP
servers on networks segments which have been blacklisted as sources
of spam. Since I have things configured to not send me duplicates
when the post is to me and a list (or to multiple lists), if a
blacklisted user copies me directly I don't get anything. When I
identify such a user I let them know and get them whitelisted on my
end, but that's hit or miss.

-Kevin

Andy Balholm wrote:

On Apr 9, 2010, at 5:08 AM, Robert Haas wrote:

Something is wrong with this
mailing list.

In the week and a half that I've been subscribed to this mailing
list, there have been several times that I received a reply to a
message without receiving the original message.

I thought that was just my mail server's greylisting messing things up
... but I just realized I turned greylisting off months ago as it'd
become ineffective.

So I'm also getting weirdly-ordered messages. Not just from -bugs,
either ; sometimes I get messages from -general in rather wacky orders,
with replies before originals etc.

--
Craig Ringer

Dave Page wrote:

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

Please?!?

I wonder, if EDB just went ahead and set one up, would people start
using it? I've been tempted to do it myself, but I'm not confident I can
handle the bandwidth/hosting for a decent tracker with upload capability
etc.

Or just use Launchpad. It's actually pretty good, and very accessible,
plus many people already have logins.

I know people are worried it'll just become full of many ignored,
dupliate or useless reports, but that's what -bugs is anyway; it's just
less visibly so. Dups and non-bugs are easily closed by the same folks
who're active on -bugs triaging here.

--
Craig Ringer

Craig Ringer wrote:

Dave Page wrote:

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

Please?!?

I wonder, if EDB just went ahead and set one up, would people start
using it? I've been tempted to do it myself, but I'm not confident I can
handle the bandwidth/hosting for a decent tracker with upload capability
etc.

Or just use Launchpad. It's actually pretty good, and very accessible,
plus many people already have logins.

I know people are worried it'll just become full of many ignored,
dupliate or useless reports, but that's what -bugs is anyway; it's just
less visibly so. Dups and non-bugs are easily closed by the same folks
who're active on -bugs triaging here.

the problem is not setting one up (in fact we had multiple serious
attempts at that) but more of how it should interact with the lists,
what tool we should use and "do we even want one". There are tons of
discussions on that very topic in the archives (and also in the wiki).

Stefan

On 2010-04-10, Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote:

Craig Ringer wrote:

Dave Page wrote:

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

Please?!?

I wonder, if EDB just went ahead and set one up, would people start
using it? I've been tempted to do it myself, but I'm not confident I can
handle the bandwidth/hosting for a decent tracker with upload capability
etc.

Or just use Launchpad. It's actually pretty good, and very accessible,
plus many people already have logins.

I know people are worried it'll just become full of many ignored,
dupliate or useless reports, but that's what -bugs is anyway; it's just
less visibly so. Dups and non-bugs are easily closed by the same folks
who're active on -bugs triaging here.

the problem is not setting one up (in fact we had multiple serious
attempts at that) but more of how it should interact with the lists,
what tool we should use and "do we even want one". There are tons of
discussions on that very topic in the archives (and also in the wiki).

you could set the Bug tracking system to CC every report to the list
and possibly have the list refuse posts that are replies to these
autoposts so that responses must go through the BTS. alternately you
could possibly set something up so that responses also go into bug
report on the BTS.

On the down side Bugzilla (the only BTS I've any familiarity with) does
produce quite a lot of administrative noise in its email,

Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2010-04-10, Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote:

Craig Ringer wrote:

Dave Page wrote:

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

Please?!?

I wonder, if EDB just went ahead and set one up, would people start
using it? I've been tempted to do it myself, but I'm not confident I can
handle the bandwidth/hosting for a decent tracker with upload capability
etc.

Or just use Launchpad. It's actually pretty good, and very accessible,
plus many people already have logins.

I know people are worried it'll just become full of many ignored,
dupliate or useless reports, but that's what -bugs is anyway; it's just
less visibly so. Dups and non-bugs are easily closed by the same folks
who're active on -bugs triaging here.

the problem is not setting one up (in fact we had multiple serious
attempts at that) but more of how it should interact with the lists,
what tool we should use and "do we even want one". There are tons of
discussions on that very topic in the archives (and also in the wiki).

you could set the Bug tracking system to CC every report to the list
and possibly have the list refuse posts that are replies to these
autoposts so that responses must go through the BTS. alternately you
could possibly set something up so that responses also go into bug
report on the BTS.

the original plan was to keep the bug report form as it is and just call
out to the BTS to get a bug id. The form would then just sent the report
like it does now. The difference would have been that the tracker is
subscribed to the list and because it "knows" about the bug-id in
question it could actually track all the responses as if they were
created through the BTS.
That way the only thing left to do in the BTS would have been actually
marking a bug as closed/todo/whatever - it would be trivial however to
generate the kind of stuff robert generated manually like "bugs nobody
replied to yet" or "bug not replied to within X days".
The prototype we had used bugzilla's xml-rpc interface and the
email-interface for this but i guess you can do similiar things with
other trackers.

Stefan

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner
<stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote:

Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2010-04-10, Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote:

Craig Ringer wrote:

Dave Page wrote:

This basically indicates that we need an issue tracker. There, look -
now see what you made me do :-(

Please?!?

I wonder, if EDB just went ahead and set one up, would people start
using it? I've been tempted to do it myself, but I'm not confident I can
handle the bandwidth/hosting for a decent tracker with upload capability
etc.

Or just use Launchpad. It's actually pretty good, and very accessible,
plus many people already have logins.

I know people are worried it'll just become full of many ignored,
dupliate or useless reports, but that's what -bugs is anyway; it's just
less visibly so. Dups and non-bugs are easily closed by the same folks
who're active on -bugs triaging here.

the problem is not setting one up (in fact we had multiple serious
attempts at that) but more of how it should interact with the lists, what
tool we should use and "do we even want one". There are tons of discussions
on that very topic in the archives (and also in the wiki).

you could set the Bug tracking system to CC every report to the list and
possibly have the list refuse posts that are replies to these
autoposts so that responses must go through the BTS. alternately you
could possibly set something up so that responses also go into bug
report on the BTS.

the original plan was to keep the bug report form as it is and just call out
to the BTS to get a bug id. The form would then just sent the report like it
does now. The difference would have been that the tracker is subscribed to
the list and because it "knows" about the bug-id in question it could
actually track all the responses as if they were created through the BTS.
That way the only thing left to do in the BTS would have been actually
marking a bug as closed/todo/whatever - it would be trivial however to
generate the kind of stuff robert generated manually like "bugs nobody
replied to yet" or "bug not replied to within X days".
The prototype we had used bugzilla's xml-rpc interface and the
email-interface for this but i guess you can do similiar things with other
trackers.

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I would favor using
something other than Bugzilla for the tracker. I'm not really sure if
there's anything that I'd consider truly good out there, but I've
always found Bugzilla pretty terrible. Then again, a bird in the hand
might be worth two in the bush.

...Robert

On sön, 2010-04-18 at 13:12 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I would favor using
something other than Bugzilla for the tracker. I'm not really sure if
there's anything that I'd consider truly good out there,

There isn't. Welcome to the show.

;-)

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Hash: RIPEMD160

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I would favor using
something other than Bugzilla for the tracker. I'm not really sure if
there's anything that I'd consider truly good out there, but I've
always found Bugzilla pretty terrible.

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 201004181546
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I would favor using
something other than Bugzilla for the tracker.  I'm not really sure if
there's anything that I'd consider truly good out there, but I've
always found Bugzilla pretty terrible.

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

One of these days, I am going to write a @$#! bug tracker.

...Robert

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:

That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, though I would favor using
something other than Bugzilla for the tracker.  I'm not really sure if
there's anything that I'd consider truly good out there, but I've
always found Bugzilla pretty terrible.

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

One of these days, I am going to write a @$#! bug tracker.

after seen the commitfest app, i can swear the bug tracker you write
should be cool

--
Atentamente,
Jaime Casanova
Soporte y capacitación de PostgreSQL
Asesoría y desarrollo de sistemas
Guayaquil - Ecuador
Cel. +59387171157

Jaime Casanova <jcasanov@systemguards.com.ec> writes:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

One of these days, I am going to write a @$#! bug tracker.

after seen the commitfest app, i can swear the bug tracker you write
should be cool

... actually, what about minimally modifying the commitfest app to turn
it into a bug tracker?

We keep complaining that none of the existing trackers would integrate
well with our workflow. ISTM what we basically need is something that
would index the pgsql-bugs archives to show what the current open issues
are. The commitfest app is dang close to that already.

regards, tom lane

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 23:14, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Jaime Casanova <jcasanov@systemguards.com.ec> writes:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

One of these days, I am going to write a @$#! bug tracker.

after seen the commitfest app, i can swear the bug tracker you write
should be cool

... actually, what about minimally modifying the commitfest app to turn
it into a bug tracker?

We keep complaining that none of the existing trackers would integrate
well with our workflow.  ISTM what we basically need is something that
would index the pgsql-bugs archives to show what the current open issues
are.  The commitfest app is dang close to that already.

Let's not do that without thinking really careful about it. The
commitfest app is good at what it does precisely because it's designed
to do just that, and nothing more (or less). Twisting it into doing
other things may make things worse rather than better.

That said, basing something off the same ideas can certainly work.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

flyspray isn't half bad, especially because its really simple and fairly
clean.
supports pgsql too.

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 23:14, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Jaime Casanova <jcasanov@systemguards.com.ec> writes:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg@turnstep.com> wrote:

Bugzilla is the worst form of bug tracking out there, except for
all the others.

One of these days, I am going to write a @$#! bug tracker.

after seen the commitfest app, i can swear the bug tracker you write
should be cool

... actually, what about minimally modifying the commitfest app to turn
it into a bug tracker?

We keep complaining that none of the existing trackers would integrate
well with our workflow.  ISTM what we basically need is something that
would index the pgsql-bugs archives to show what the current open issues
are.  The commitfest app is dang close to that already.

Let's not do that without thinking really careful about  it. The
commitfest app is good at what it does precisely because it's designed
to do just that, and nothing more (or less). Twisting it into doing
other things may make things worse rather than better.

That said, basing something off the same ideas can certainly work.

I don't think the code is terribly hard to write no matter how we do
it, and if that means I have to write it, oh well. What is
frustrating about the current process is that ~5% of the bugs don't
get a response. How are we going to fix that problem?

...Robert

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]

What is frustrating about the current process is that ~5% of the bugs don't
get a response.  How are we going to fix that problem?

that's a two side problem, while certainly there are valid bug reports
that fall in the cracks, there are bug reports without a lot of info,
or with a misguided subject line or that are sent to a wrong list...
those we will miss no matter what...

for those that are valid bug reports we would need a team of people
that categorize and/or respond the bugs as soon as they come... like
patch reviewers but they just respond the easy ones, and let difficult
ones for more experienced people, and maybe something like "fix bug
fest" maybe at the end of commit fests?

of course most of this is just a dream, or not?

--
Atentamente,
Jaime Casanova
Soporte y capacitación de PostgreSQL
Asesoría y desarrollo de sistemas
Guayaquil - Ecuador
Cel. +59387171157