Re: [dev] Some suckless hackathon 2017 preparation

From: Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2017 09:40:57 +0200

On 25 July 2017 at 11:59, Laslo Hunhold <dev_AT_frign.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2017 22:13:36 -0500
> Joshua Haase <hahj87_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> I do think a good issue tracker is needed and would be willing to
>> contribute on september 2-3 (although maybe in a different time zone:
>> [UTC-6]).
>>
>> As for useless bug reports, a good cure would be to give access only
>> to people who can make a pair of ssh keys and sign with gpg their bug
>> reports.
>
> I honestly agree with Hiltjo here. Issue trackers lead to the
> developers becoming code monkeys, being flooded with
> invalid/useless/insane bug reports.
[..]
> I would go as far to say that issue trackers are harmful, only exciting
> for those who don't work themselves, i.e. for those who like to
> delegate work. The parallel to how most companies are run nowadays,

IMHO this view is short sighted. The point of an _issue_ tracker (not
every issue is a bug) is not the possibility to flood the developer
with random bug reports, but to provide a simple infrastructure to
organize and priotize a TODO list for the development of a certain
project -- AND also to document the development, why some decision was
made at some point in time. The idea for a suckless issue tracker is
to make it mailing-list based, so that one can work with it with plain
mails. It thus also allows discussions and patches.

Of course issue trackers can become a management monitoring tool as
well, but that's not the primary use of it. The primary use is that
developers can organize and serialize the various inputs like ideas,
requests, bugs in a proper and transparent way to create a roadmap for
themselves. There are times, especially outside the maturity phase of
software, where the inflow of ideas and bugs will outnumber the
ability of a developer to tackle it down immediately. At that stage
having a suckless issue tracker would be really handy.

> where managers with their corporate newspeak make decisions on things
> they don't understand (see Scrum for instance), is striking. Requiring
> a minimal amount of technical understanding is not too much to ask.

All those corporate processes are not the result of introducing issue
tracker tools. I agree with your critic particularly about Scrum,
which is a hideous software development methodology. But in general
those corporate issues are not rooted by the introduction of a
suckless issue tracker, simply because there is no suckless issue
tracker yet. All issue trackers I came across are heavily
over-engineered or developed by people that are incompetent to use
email.

Best regards,
Anselm
Received on Wed Jul 26 2017 - 09:40:57 CEST