[Inquisitor]

Anyone here familiar with this web based tool? Warpcore has suggested it as an alternative for bug tracking.

[IceFire]

Pardon my ignorance.  What does bug tracking do exactly?  The basics are obvious but I don't really have a good understanding of some of the more subtle implications.

[Inquisitor]

Bug tracking CAN be of things.

At it's most basic, it's someone (could be anyone) submits a bug, with a detailed description. Many bug trackers enforce a minimum of infoirmation (sometimes customizeable) like, make and model of PC, ram, video card manufacturer, video ram, build number, etc.

That information goes into a database of some sort, and sometimes manually, and sometimes automatically, gets assigned to a developer for.

Some bug trackers email you when you have bugs, some don't, it gives you a way to keep track of how many issues you have that are considered yours (for instance, we might have one person doing all the openGL fixes, another doing sound), give you (and others) a way to track what has been done with an issue (has it been confirmed, can it be reproduced, if so, was it easy to fix? does it need to be reassigned to the person who originally wrote the code? is there a plan to fix it at all?) how bad the issue is (crash bug, kills the whole PC? or is it a little thing like a graphic is a pixel off?).

Anyway, a central place to see what needs to be worked on OUTSIDE the design document and adding new features, so, anyone involved in the project can get a "state of the union" on the projects health.

Clear as mud?

[Gangsta]

*pops out of nowhere*

I recently setup Bugzilla at my office to keep track of issues with our application.... very nice... bit of a ***** to configure though.  I'd certainly be able to help you out though

[Inquisitor]

I dunno, the folks over at Warpcore seem to want to do it themselves.

I might need a walkthru though

[EvilTypeGuy]

To all who offered help to him, thanks. bugzilla is now setup for that project at:

http://fs2source.warpcore.org/bugzilla

[Mysterial]

Inquisitor or whoever has web page edit access: Put a link to bugzilla on the main page. I or someone else is no doubt going to forget it's there if you don't

[Inquisitor]

I'm getting to it

[EvilTypeGuy]

Done.

[Inquisitor]

Fine, be that way

[EvilTypeGuy]

[Inquisitor]

Ok, revisting.

Gangsta, was it you that volunteered some help with getting to know Bugzilla?

Cause now, I need it

[penguin]

I've looked at bugzilla and the XML interface.  I have a hacky perl script that will take a CSV file (comma separated values -- a text spreadsheet) and create the XML that I think would be acceptable to bugzilla.  I'm gonna toy around with it on my local box (I have bugzilla and MySQL set up here for testing) and see if I can convert the spreadsheet from Inquisitor and Ace Pace into a suitable XML document for bugzilla.

I think we need to decide what major/minor categories we are going to have for Bugzilla.  I'm not sure 100% how this is configured in bugzilla, but here are my thoughts:

Major categories would be products; currently FS2 (the game itself) and FRED2.  Possible other major categories might deal with "global" stuff like file formats ( *.tbl files, POF files, etc.)

Minor categories would be components of the main categories.  For FS2, this would include:

Graphics (in-game)
Menu UI (the out-of-game stuff)
AI
Sound
Multi player
Weapons (e.g., fighter beams)
Ships (e.g., being able to fly capships)
and of course, "Other"

There are probably other things I missed.

Also, we need to differentiate between bugs and feature requests

[Gangsta]

yes.. it was me... let me know if and when you wanna walk through.... it's not too tricky.... but I'm nearly always around ICQ=1278977... AIM=Matt1278977)

[Inquisitor]

I was thinking as much a tutorial, as a "someone to help us run it" kinda thing

[Gangsta]

well.... I'll do whatever you want me to do..... I've been desperatly trying to think of something I can do to help the community in some way or another.....

[Inquisitor]

Catch me in some kind of chat this week, we'll see what we can see