At LCA 2005, Luis Villa presented a talk on being a bugmaster, and
that inspired me to do some triage on SCons.
Unfortunately that means dealing with Sourceforget’s hideous tracker
interface, so of course I never got around to it.
Some months and thinking later, I realised I needed to pay more
attention to my Debian bugs, which being in a separate bug tracker
meant they were rarely on my radar. In our own office, we have both a
Request Tracker and a Bugzilla, and keeping a track of my todo list is
pretty hard when it’s split between the two – it’s hard enough when
requests come from staff out of band of either of them.
I also forget how to use the tools: there’s a threshold of work in
triaging bugs, and if that threshold is too high, I’ll do something
else instead.
So the solution was to make a tool that put all my bugs, all tickets,
issues, problems, feature requests, and so on into a single view –
aggregate them from all the trackers that I use and put them on my
desktop. Present a single interface to triage all those bugs, so that
I don’t have to remember how to use the upstream tracker.
I mention this all, because Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote this morning
really hit home with me – all of the merging of information and
collaboration is exactly the way to go forward, and I’m excited that
Canonical is building the infrastructure to help push that forward.
So, I have this tool, still in development, in bzr:
bzr pull http://repo.spacepants.org/bugtool/bugtool.dev/
It’s able to pull bugs from Sourceforget, and from the RT instance in
our office; needs a bit of work now to get the interaction going but
that should appear in the coming weeks.
I don’t like the name, though… I’m thinking it should be called
’tuffet':
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Triaging her bugs all day
Along came a spider
and sat down beside her
So she "triaged" that bug with some spray.