[OSM-talk] Proposal for a map-bug tracker (Openstreetbugs)

[Christoph Böhme]

Just a follow up to my last message:
I did a bit of research on the osm software stack yesterday evening and
I think implementing a genuine map bugtracker isn't more work than
adapting bugzilla. This is basically because the most important part of
the map bugtracker is the user interface. And that has to be rewritten
in both cases. The rest consists only of some database tables and a
RESTful controller to add, edit, and query bugs in the database and
return them in different formats (e.g. XML, JSON, RSS).

I recently started to work with Pylons which is claims to be very
similar to Rails. From this experience I expect the job of writing a
bugtracker-controller to be not very difficult. I will try to install
the rails-port on my computer at the weekend and have a look at it.
For the user interface side it might be possible to user the current
osb code as a starting point.

It would be nice if we could decide on one solution instead of
implementing two competing ones. So, it would be good to have a look at
the advantages and disadvantages of a bugzilla and a rails-port
solution and decide then which one fits best. Perhaps which should also
ask the software developers how they feel about moving from trac to
bugzilla. This seemed to be one of your main points for using bugzilla.

Christoph


Christoph Böhme <christoph at b3e.net> schrieb:

> Hi!
> 
> Steffen Vogel <info at steffenvogel.de> schrieb:
> > Am Donnerstag, den 27.11.2008, 15:16 +0000 schrieb Christoph Böhme:
> > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bugtracker_proposal
> > 
> > Hey great work!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> > I already modified the software-bug classifications, statuses of
> > Bugzilla, due to the needs of a MapBugTracker.
> > 
> > Do we have some perl programmers around here?
> 
> I am more into python ...
>  
> > I could need some help to adapt the slippy map scripts to Bugzilla.
> > It's not as hard as it might sound.
> > Bugzilla owns a XML-RPC backend which we can use...
> 
> This sounds quite handy and like a clean interface. However, Richard's
> comment about the complexity of writing a new bugtracker compared to
> adapting one for mapping still makes me think. At the moment it looks
> like as if we have to replace the current user interface of bugzilla
> with a completely new one that is suitable for mapping. The original
> user interface won't be of much use for a map bugtracker (I personally
> would always want to see where the bugs are). I am wondering how much
> code there is in a bugtracker which is independent from the user
> interface. Basically it boils down to the question if we write a new
> interface how many parts of bugzilla will we actually use? And will
> these parts fit well into a map bugtracker?
> 
> Bugzilla has an incredible amount of features but to me they seem to
> be made very much for software developer teams where only a relatively
> small number of people is actually fixing bugs. This is quite
> different to the osm community where several thousand people can
> possibly solve bugs. I thinks this makes many of bugzillas features
> unneccessary or even counterproductive if they were used in the osm
> community.
> 
> I really do not want to put you off from adapting bugzilla to
> openstreetmap but at the moment I cannot see what advantages we would
> get from using bugzilla compared to creating something specific for
> osm.
> 
> 	Christoph
> 
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