Timwi wrote:
Of course, if we had BugZilla instead, this would be trivial. With BugZilla, you can give each bug a priority, and then you can directly link to a list of all bugs with a given priority. This is just an example; there are hundreds of thousands of ways of cataloguing/categorising bugs in BugZilla.
Maybe instead of the Bounty system, I should volunteer to help install BugZilla on Wikimedia instead?
I'll point out that you *can* set priorities on bugs in the SourceForge bug tracker and sort the list by priority.
However Bugzilla isn't a bad idea; I've seen some nicer-looking Bugzilla installations around (Gnome's and Red Hat's are fairly pleasant), and there are some problems with our current setup that could use fixing. Our servers don't fall over quite as often as they used to, so I'm not too worried about eggs-one-basket syndrome.
Things that should get solved with the bug tracking:
1) Clear, easy searching. While you can search on SF, it's kind of difficult and non-obvious. We get a *lot* of duplicate reports, and the easier it is to make people search first, the fewer we have to wade through.
2) Login integration with the wikis. A lot of people just don't leave a way to contact them or just leave a WikiName without logging in for the system's e-mail reports, and it's hard to get more information back from them about hard to reproduce bugs. We could force people to log in to SF before reporting, but this is an additional pain in the ass. If peoples' wiki logins could carry over more or less automatically this would be very helpful.
3) Cross-linking. Bugzilla's hyperlinks in the comments are a big help; we could add an interwiki setup to link more easily from the wikis to bug reports as well. Marking duplicates in Bugzilla is also a lot easier.
The main other issue is just getting people to keep up with the reports. This is grunt work, unfortunately.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)