[Scummvm-devel] Evaluating GitHub issues tracker

[Max Horn]

Am 25.04.2011 um 23:49 schrieb Johannes Schickel:

> On 04/24/2011 01:47 PM, Max Horn wrote:
>> 4) Power and ease-of-use for developers:
>> It should be possible to add useful meta-info to the reports (by us developers, I mean) without having to resort to nasty tricks (like prefixing an "ENGINE NAME:" in bug titles, like we do on SF.net). I like that SF.net provides a category&  group field, but it is far too limited in that it does not allow arbitrary "categories", nor tags. The github issue tracker is IMHO worse, as it only allows "labels" (and in a test I just did on Firefox 4, these did not work *at all* :/).
>> 
>> Another important feature: Good "reporting", i.e. being able to list "all open bug reports about the TOON engine on platform WinCE" and stuff. SF.net tracker is doing reasonably well here. But do not *force* this on me like trac does (I hate that).
> 
> I am not sure but I checked the issues on residual in github and labels 
> seemed to work fine with firefox 4 (frankly I didn't try to create an 
> issue there).

Yes, they work -- my problem was that the UI lead me to believe I could create new labels while creating a new bug. Turns out you cannot do that, you have to pre-declare labels you want to use. So these are really "labels" and not "tags" (as e.g. Google Code offers... far more powerful, too ...)

> Also it seems to allow to filter by selecting labels and I 
> would *guess* that you can select two labels and only issues tagged with 
> both are shown.

Yes you can do that.

However, I don't yet see how the system scales (unlike multi-value fields in e.g. Google Code, or Mantis, or Trac, etc.). For ScummVM, we might want to have labels for
* engines
* games
* platforms
* bug severity
* bug priority
at the very least.
Now, I imagine we could use distinct colors for each type. And it's nice to be able to filter by those etc.

But the above amounts to well over 100 different labels. I have serious doubts that this will be very usable in their UI...  but maybe I am missing something?

> That seems better nicer than what sf.net's tracker 
> features IMHO, but I didn't check that in depth yet.

IMHO it is better in some ways, and worse in others. Seeing that other tracker vendors manage to be better in every way than SF.net, that makes github less appealing to me...

Bye,
Max