State of Affairs
FreeBSD currently uses GNATS for its bugtracking system. Some people think that it is good enough for our purposes; others feel that we could do better. Feelings run rather high on the issue. This page and subsequent pages will attempt to summarize what we know so far.
This page isn't a discussion about personal preferences but rather focuses on what features we need or would like to see in the new system.
Existing Bug Tracking Systems
Here's the link to Wikipedia's Issue Trackers comparison page.
FreeBSD Developers have mentioned the following software as possible replacements for GNATS:
Bugzilla (devel/bugzilla*): Read our internal Bugzilla page.
Mantis (databases/mantis)
RT (www/rt*)
Trac (www/trac): tons of add-ons available in the ports tree (www/trac-*)
Requirements for a FreeBSD Bug Tracking System
Necessary
- Stability: must not crash under load.
- Scalability: must scale to tens of thousands of PRs, which is what we have now. The size of the project is only going to grow.
- Web and email interface, the latter especially important for the visually impaired.
Desirable
Possibility to import existing PR database from GNATS, if only to be able to test the system before it goes live. IF conversion isn't a possibility, the GNATS system can be kept alive while these old PRs are still open.
- Ability to replicate the database for local use (portsmon makes use of this, but it's preferable that ordinary users are able to get access too).
- Bug subscription (e.g. by regex)
Nice to have
- CLI tools (similar to query-pr, take-pr, ...)
Security: misguided people have misused GNATS in the past, so we must be able to prevent tampering.
- Collaboration: Allow FreeBSD-derived projects like FreeSBIE/FreeNAS/DesktopBSD and others to share their bug reports with the mothership; i.e., have a way for them to propagate bug reports into the FreeBSD bug database and allow notifications of bug state changes to propagate back -- jkoshy