ExtJS needs a bugtracker

[davenolan]

ExtJS needs a public read/write bugtracker. I know this has been raised several times before. Here are some reasons for not having a bugtracker I've seen on previous threads.

Bogus reason 1) We need the forum to screen out all the crud before it gets in the bugtracker.

This is not a good reason. People are already screening out the crud in the forum, right, in order to decide what goes in the private bugtracker? So why not do that task in, well, a bugtracker?

Bugtrackers make it easier to screen out crud. That's what they are designed to do. It's much easier to spot a bug report filled in by a JavaScript beginner than it is to screen forum posts. That's because the bugtracker asks for specific, structured information (browser version, console log, expected behaviour etc.) It can help enforce the rules we have in the bug forum at the moment.

Bogus reason 2) Keeping the forum means there's a single search context for support, which is better for searchability

Overall, it's harder to search the forum than it is to search a bugtracker. In a bugtracker, issues are structured data. There are different ways to search, filter, sort, find, categorize etc. This is not the case with the forum, despite trying to enforce a consistent naming scheme.

The aim of having a single support area for everything can be acheived by either porting the forum to the bugtracker (lots of them have forums) (I will help). Or it can be abandoned - many other projects -larger projects, even - manage perfectly well having separate areas for help and for bugs/feature requests.

Bogus reason 3) There's just too many bugs filed that are just simple programming errors for a public bugtracker to work. There aren't the resouces to maintain it.

It's also much easier to keep track of just the issues you are interested in, both as a consumer and a dev. Every decent bugtracker will have a way of filtering out irrelevant or badly-formed issues.


Anyway, here's the conversation that prompted me to post this...

Me: I'd like to use ExtJS for the Dollortron 9000 project.
Boss: Kewl. <Googles> Where's the bugtracker? I can only find this ugly Vbulletin forum.
Me: Er, that's it apart from a private one the devs apparently use.
Boss: WTF? Are they serious? <Puts bulging wallet back in safe>

Boss may be right, boss may be wrong, but we dearly need a bugtracker.

/rant

Big love to all the devs and everyone who helps here. I just want to make everyone's life easier!

[Animal]

I agree.

A beautiful, Extified bugtracker, crafted by Mr Slocum himself.

It would enhance the product mightily, and probably be saleable because all other bugtrackers I have used are a little uncomfortable and fiddly to use.

[jay@moduscreate.com]

Agreed. I have yet to see a truly web 2.0 bug tracker.


Anyone looking to make a new project? :)

[mathieuj]

+1 and also a trac timeline or equivalent would be really great !

Mathieu

[Kango_V]

+1. We make use of Jira in our company and love it. I know it's not open source, but it's the best we found. Nice and extensible too with a good API.

But whatever system you use, it's gotta be light years ahead of a forum :>.

[harley.333]

agreed - we also use Jira - it's not perfect, but it works and it's easy to admin. i can't imagine using a forum for my bug tracking.

[davenolan]

Can one of the devs tell us what they use at the moment? It could be easier to start with that in the short term.

[jburnhams]

I'd find it useful to be able to see what the Ext team consider the status of a bug. Especially, what svn tag or release the fix has/will make it into.

For example, two bugs I've raised / commented on:

[FIXED][2.x] Bug in GroupingStore with remote grouping? (http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21458)
Evant has provided an override but I don't know if the fix is in SVN or the next release so won't know when I no longer need the override.

[2.0.2][OPEN] Combo box doesn't setValue for empty text (http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27386)
I raised this bug over a year ago. Other users have provided overrides. Brian commented in early December to say "Yep, it's on the list. We'll definitely look into it before the next release." but it hasn't been fixed in the release since then. It would be useful to see why the user provided override wasn't added to the release and what the Ext team's plans are for it.

[mjlecomte]

Maybe the subject of this thread would be a candidate question to be asked at the conference:
http://extjs.com/conference/sessions/session.php?sid=6

Maybe we can start a thread to promote ideas for questions to be asked for that session.
Why not? : see here (http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?p=304848#post304848)

[davenolan]

Maybe the subject of this thread would be a candidate question to be asked at the conference:
http://extjs.com/conference/sessions/session.php?sid=6

Maybe we can start a thread to promote ideas for questions to be asked for that session.
Why not? : see here (http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?p=304848#post304848)

Done!

[davenolan]

Is it possible for one of the devs to give an official response? I know you chaps are busy with 3.0 and the conference, but it would be great to get just an, "OK we heard you"... :)

[aconran]

Can one of the devs tell us what they use at the moment? It could be easier to start with that in the short term.

We use Trac.

I'm not going to get involved in the question of why we don't allow people to publicly submit issues in our bugtracker.

[mschwartz]

I would suggest Trac, too.

[jburnhams]

What about public read-only access? That way, when a forum bug report is accepted as a bug a link to the trac bug report could be posted and we could see when a fix makes it into SVN / a release there.

[stever]

We can create our own Trac bug tracker for Ext. ~o) Hmm... maybe I can set that up this weekend. I was just going over some of our fixes for Ext bugs today.

We thought about using ExtJS's hosted CDN version at some point, but the problem is that besides bugs not getting fixed, bugs that do get fixed take a long time to make it out into the public version. It ends up being useless. But it's no big deal to have your own CDN, but no "communal" benefit from using a common copy. Oh well.

[stever]

One other thing -- Trac (which we use) and others have xml/rpc modules so you can access them remotely... Meaning that you can also create a completely separate, ExtJS based front end to it. Which would be a cool project (ExtJS Corp could sponsor a Google Summer of Code project for such a thing!). :D

[davenolan]

We thought about using ExtJS's hosted CDN version at some point, but the problem is that besides bugs not getting fixed, bugs that do get fixed take a long time to make it out into the public version. It ends up being useless. But it's no big deal to have your own CDN, but no "communal" benefit from using a common copy. Oh well.

Sorry, what do you mean by "hosted CDN" version?

Even if fixes take a long time to reach the public version, is it not still worthwhile having a single place for all information about an issue - including, say, patches for currently available versions?

[davenolan]

I'm not going to get involved in the question of why we don't allow people to publicly submit issues in our bugtracker.

Is that because it's a closed issue for the Devs or that it's not your area of concern?

[mjlecomte]

Sorry, what do you mean by "hosted CDN" version?

http://extjs.com/blog/2008/11/18/ext-cdn-custom-builds-compression-and-fast-performance/

[ostghost]

hi,

maybe reinventing wheel isn´t best way. try to look on jira from atlassian http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ they have also other sw and together is it quite complex solution.

even zend at leat on zend framework project choose it as issue tracking http://framework.zend.com/issues/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa

pure web 2.0 tracker with ale extjs bells and whistles could be nice and also presented as complex demo application but imho time to write it should be used to move ext to next milestones

[stever]

JIRA and TRAC both have remote capabilities which is how Eclipse is able to interoperate with both directly. So by that same token, you could create a ExtJS frontend for either.

However, Trac is free, JIRA is not. And there might be confusion with their open source exception, so it is best to just avoid it and any hastles that might come from that.


As for the idea of having workarounds -- I like that. Perhaps if we have our own bug database, we can restrict bug reports to only those that have workarounds. Not being in the Core group of ExtJS, I don't see much of a point of handling one otherwise.

[davenolan]

http://extjs.com/blog/2008/11/18/ext-cdn-custom-builds-compression-and-fast-performance/

Ah OK, that's what I thought, so it relates to creating an ExtJS frontend, not the more fundamental issue of having *some* bugtracker *any* bugtracker!

[durlabh]

For our internal apps, we are using an IssueTracker we created using ExtJS/ C#/ SQL in couple of days. Here are the screenshots:

http://www.durlabh.com/misc/projectList.png
http://www.durlabh.com/misc/issueList.png
http://www.durlabh.com/misc/issueEditor.png

So, I'm sure if need be, Trac front-end can be developed within couple of days using ExtJS!

[davenolan]

jQuery made their copy of Trac look pretty nice. Here is a timeline to show their changes day by day to the source:

http://dev.jquery.com/timeline/

I have a version of Trac for ExtJS. I'll populate it with some changes to Ext that I made over the years. Would be a better source of documentation than I have now! Anyone else interested in putting in bugs that have fixes or workarounds?

Definitely willing to help transfer stuff from the forums.

[davenolan]

Since there is already a bug forum here, and I don't want to replace it as a forum to ask if something is a bug, etc. But for those that are above noob level, know what the problem is AND have a solution, then this might be a good source.

I think it ought to be for things already filtered with proposed fixes for it to be worthwhile.

http://tracext.appcenter.com/report/1

Excellent, thank you. This is a great place to start, though it strikes me as more of a patch tracker than a bug tracker :) I still believe that we really need a single bugtracker that store the current state of knowledge about defects in ExtJS. But that will require involvement from the devs, who have been silent hitherto.

Anyway, thanks very much Stever. How do you want to play it? Should people apply to you for logins, or do you want to update it yourself?