From time to time suggestions are made that the PostgreSQL project should use trackers to manage bugs and possibly feature requests. I have a lot of sympathy with these suggestions. But there has always been lots of pushback, along with significant disagreement about which tracker to use. Having done a bunch of work years ago to make Bugzilla platform independent, I have some fondness for it, but others hate it with a passion that seems way out of proportion to the perceived evil, so it's probably out of the question, if we ever did decide to use some sort of tracker.
Meanwhile, I encountered the Perl community's use of a tracker yesterday. David Wheeler encouraged me to file a bug about the recently discovered misbehaviour of a documented piece of the perl API. Accordingly, I ran perlbug and it told me that it had sent the bug report. Later he asked me if I had done so, as he couldn't find the report. First black mark. Then I went and looked at the tracker's web interface. What I saw was just horrible. For perl 5 there are 259 "new" bugs, (the oldest 8 years old, which isn't "new" in my book) and 1149 open bugs. And my bug, which their own program told me had been successfully submitted, didn't seem to be there. What's the point in having such a system? It's worse than useless. Trackers require effort to maintain. As I remarked to David, it's no wonder that there is significant resistance to using them when we have horrible examples like this one.
Meanwhile, I encountered the Perl community's use of a tracker yesterday. David Wheeler encouraged me to file a bug about the recently discovered misbehaviour of a documented piece of the perl API. Accordingly, I ran perlbug and it told me that it had sent the bug report. Later he asked me if I had done so, as he couldn't find the report. First black mark. Then I went and looked at the tracker's web interface. What I saw was just horrible. For perl 5 there are 259 "new" bugs, (the oldest 8 years old, which isn't "new" in my book) and 1149 open bugs. And my bug, which their own program told me had been successfully submitted, didn't seem to be there. What's the point in having such a system? It's worse than useless. Trackers require effort to maintain. As I remarked to David, it's no wonder that there is significant resistance to using them when we have horrible examples like this one.