BerliOS bug tracker

[Axel]

ondrej,

> Of course there are other options as well and I certainly do not want
> to start a flamewar about this, whatever works for you. A single
> comment though - I consider a proper (and working) bug tracker better
> than the current "official" bug reporting procedure, both for users
> and developers. But as I said, whatever works for you.

please consider that a "bug tracker" website is just a formality
or one means of communication. whether you post a description
of your problem here and upload the files, or attach them to a
bug tracker website is essentially the same work for you, and
the bug report does not get any better or worse because of it.

to be working well, it needs to be used well by both, developers and
users.
unfortunately, there are very few people developing and using
scientific software
that have the time/interest/willpower/patience to go through the
learning process. if most developers in a group do so, they may have
different opinions on how to use the tool and if a significant number
of
people don't use the bug tracker, then the whole process already
breaks
down (you have bugs that are never listed as resolved, even if fixed).

from my personal experience, most bug trackers of open source projects
are overloaded with unresolved "bugs" that are hard to track down
because
of the insufficient amount of information provided and the fact that
in this
maze of half-information. it is almost impossible to determine whether
an
existing bug report is the same as what you are experiencing. i went
through
this kind of odyssey recently when trying to report the problems with
my
laptop graphics and am still trying to figure out where to best report
the
problems. there are bugs with obviously unrelated followups, tons of
identical bugs reported as new ones, a discouraging number of
unresolved
bugs versus fixed ones and a depressing average age of unassigned
bugs.
it seemed to me that the main developer of the driver had the choice
of
sorting through this mess or working on the driver.

in a larger corporation you can assign somebody with less experience
to
track down and reproduce bugs (it is very good training, btw) and then
coalesce
the bug reports into something that can be digested by the main
developers.
in a project like cp2k which is chronically suffering from lack of
time of the
people working on it, this is the impossible dream. would you be
willing to
donate the time and set this up and make it work??

cheers,
   axel.

>
> Cheers,
> Ondrej