Ask HN: Distributed Bug Tracking - Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1760067

by damoncali • 16 years ago

3 3 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I keep coming across people who would like a bug tracker that works like git - distributed bug tracking. I'm having a tough time getting them to explain why that would be better than a standard web app. What is the use case?

Anyone have any thoughts?

madhouse• 16 years ago

It would have the same advantage as distributed source control: it's distributed.

It works offline, meaning I can add bug reports, comments, change them and so on and so forth while being offline. Or one could work on the reports and publish a cleaned up state, without all the noise he might have generated during triage.

That's two cases where being distributed would help.

Also, most of the current distributed bug tracker efforts tie into a distributed VCS, which has the added advantage of the entire issue database coming coupled with the code: one doesn't have to visit yet another web application, doesn't have to figure out where the original bugtracker is, and so on and so forth.

TimMontague• 16 years ago

There's an article on LWN from 2008 about distributed bug tracking: http://lwn.net/Articles/281849/

One advantage that it mentions is a more tight coupling with distributed source code management systems.

bobds• 16 years ago

Having less things to manage and the advantages of distributed source control also applied to the bug tracker.

Fossil is an interesting choice since it integrates everything in one nice package, provides a web-based GUI and is only a single executable file that can run on most platforms. http://www.fossil-scm.org/

Ikiwiki is something that you can use with SVN or Git, it basically lets a wiki live along with your code in your repos. There's a lot of plugins for it, so it can be more than a wiki. http://ikiwiki.info/

Ask HN: Distributed Bug Tracking - Why?

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